Frequently Asked Questions for FreeBSD
8.X, 9.X and 10.X

The FreeBSD Documentation Project

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Abstract

This is the Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ for FreeBSD versions 8.X,
9.X and 10.X. Every effort has been made to
make this FAQ as informative as possible;
if you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved, send
them to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list.

The latest version of this document is always available
from the FreeBSD
website. It may also be downloaded as one large
HTML file with HTTP or as
a variety of other formats from the FreeBSD FTP
server.

FreeBSD is a modern operating system for desktops,
laptops, servers, and embedded systems with support for a
large number of platforms.

It is based on U.C. Berkeley's
“4.4BSD-Lite” release, with some
“4.4BSD-Lite2” enhancements. It is also
based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C.
Berkeley's “Net/2” to the i386™, known as
“386BSD”, though very little of the 386BSD
code remains.

FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers,
researchers, computer professionals, students and home
users all over the world in their work, education and
recreation.

The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide a stable
and fast general purpose operating system that may be used
for any purpose without strings attached.

1.3.

Does the FreeBSD license have any restrictions?

Yes. Those restrictions do not control how the code
is used, but how to treat the FreeBSD Project itself.
The license itself is available at
license
and can be summarized like this:

Do not claim that you wrote this.

Do not sue us if it breaks.

Do not remove or modify the license.

Many of us have a significant investment in the
project and would certainly not mind a little financial
compensation now and then, but we definitely do not insist
on it. We believe that our first and foremost
“mission” is to provide code to any and all
comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets
the widest possible use and provides the widest possible
benefit. This, we believe, is one of the most fundamental
goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically
support.

Code in our source tree which falls under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) or GNU
Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with
slightly more strings attached, though at least on the
side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite.
Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the
commercial use of GPL software, we do, however, endeavor
to replace such software with submissions under the more
relaxed FreeBSD
license whenever possible.

1.4.

Can FreeBSD replace my current operating system?

For most people, yes. But this question is not quite
that cut-and-dried.

Most people do not actually use an operating system.
They use applications. The applications are what really
use the operating system. FreeBSD is designed to provide a
robust and full-featured environment for applications. It
supports a wide variety of web browsers, office suites,
email readers, graphics programs, programming
environments, network servers, and much more.
Most of these applications can be
managed through the Ports
Collection.

If an application is only available on one operating
system, that operating system cannot just be replaced.
Chances are, there is a very similar application on FreeBSD,
however. As a solid office or Internet server or a
reliable workstation, FreeBSD will almost certainly do
everything you need. Many computer users across the
world, including both novices and experienced UNIXÂ®
administrators, use FreeBSD as their only desktop operating
system.

Users migrating to FreeBSD from another UNIXÂ®-like
environment will find FreeBSD to be similar.
WindowsÂ® and MacÂ OSÂ® users may be interested in instead
using PC-BSD, a
FreeBSD-based desktop distribution. Non-UNIXÂ® users should
expect to invest some additional time learning the
UNIXÂ® way of doing things. This FAQ
and the FreeBSD
Handbook are excellent places to start.

1.5.

Why is it called FreeBSD?

It may be used free of charge, even by commercial
users.

Full source for the operating system is freely
available, and the minimum possible restrictions have
been placed upon its use, distribution and
incorporation into other work (commercial or
non-commercial).

Anyone who has an improvement or bug fix is free
to submit their code and have it added to the source
tree (subject to one or two obvious
provisions).

It is worth pointing out that the word
“free” is being used in two ways here: one
meaning “at no cost” and the other meaning
“do whatever you like”. Apart from
one or two things you cannot do with
the FreeBSD code, for example pretending you wrote it, you
can really do whatever you like with it.

1.6.

What are the differences between FreeBSD and NetBSD,
OpenBSD, and other open source BSD operating
systems?

James Howard wrote a good explanation of the history
and differences between the various projects, called The
BSD Family Tree which goes a fair way to
answering this question. Some of the information is out
of date, but the history portion in particular remains
accurate.

Most of the BSDs share patches and code, even today.
All of the BSDs have common ancestry.

The design goals of FreeBSD are described in Q:Â 1.2, above. The design goals of
the other most popular BSDs may be summarized as
follows:

OpenBSD aims for operating system security above
all else. The OpenBSD team wrote ssh(1) and
pf(4), which have both been ported to
FreeBSD.

NetBSD aims to be easily ported to other hardware
platforms.

DragonFlyÂ BSD is a fork of FreeBSDÂ 4.8 that
has since developed many interesting features of its
own, including the HAMMER file system and support for
user-mode “vkernels”.

1.7.

What is the latest version of FreeBSD?

At any point in the development of FreeBSD, there can be
multiple parallel branches. 10.X releases are made
from the 10-STABLE branch, and 9.X releases are
made from the 9-STABLE branch.

Up until the release of 9.0, the 9.X series
was the one known as -STABLE.
However, as of 11.X, the 9.X branch
will be designated for an “extended support”
status and receive only fixes for major problems, such as
security-related fixes.

Version 10.1
is the latest release from the 10-STABLE branch; it was
released in November 2014. Version 9.3
is the latest release from the 9-STABLE branch; it
was released in July 2014.

Briefly, -STABLE is aimed at the
ISP, corporate user, or any user who wants stability and a
minimal number of changes compared to the new (and
possibly unstable) features of the latest
-CURRENT snapshot. Releases can come
from either branch, but -CURRENT
is meant for users who are prepared for its increased
volatility, relative to
-STABLE.

Releases are made every
few months. While many people stay more
up-to-date with the FreeBSD sources (see the questions on
FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE) than that, doing so
is more of a commitment, as the sources are a moving
target.

FreeBSD-CURRENT
is the development version of the operating system, which
will in due course become the new FreeBSD-STABLE branch. As
such, it is really only of interest to developers working
on the system and die-hard hobbyists. See the relevant
section in the Handbook
for details on running
-CURRENT.

Users not familiar with FreeBSD should not use
FreeBSD-CURRENT. This branch sometimes evolves quite quickly
and due to mistake can be un-buildable at times. People
that use FreeBSD-CURRENT are expected to be able to analyze,
debug, and report problems.

FreeBSD snapshot
releases are made based on the current state of the
-CURRENT and
-STABLE branches. The goals behind
each snapshot release are:

To test the latest version of the installation
software.

To give people who would like to run
-CURRENT or
-STABLE but who do not have the
time or bandwidth to follow it on a day-to-day basis
an easy way of bootstrapping it onto their
systems.

To preserve a fixed reference point for the code
in question, just in case we break something really
badly later. (Although Subversion normally prevents
anything horrible like this happening.)

To ensure that all new features and fixes in need
of testing have the greatest possible number of
potential testers.

No claims are made that any
-CURRENT snapshot can be considered
“production quality” for any purpose.
If a stable and fully tested system is needed,
stick to full releases or use the
-STABLE snapshots.

Official snapshots are generated on a regular
basis for all actively developed branches.

1.9.

What is the FreeBSD-STABLE
concept?

Back when FreeBSDÂ 2.0.5 was released, FreeBSD
development branched in two. One branch was named -STABLE,
one -CURRENT.
FreeBSD-STABLE is intended for Internet
Service Providers and other commercial enterprises for
whom sudden shifts or experimental features are quite
undesirable. It receives only well-tested bug fixes and
other small incremental enhancements.
FreeBSD-CURRENT, on the other hand, has
been one unbroken line since 2.0 was released, leading
towards 10.1-RELEASE and beyond. For more
detailed information on branches see “FreeBSD
Release Engineering: Creating the Release
Branch”, the status of the branches and
the upcoming release schedule can be found on the Release
Engineering Information page.

10.1-STABLE is the actively developed
-STABLE branch. The latest release
on the 10.1-STABLE branch is
10.1-RELEASE, which was released in
November 2014.

The 11-CURRENT branch is the actively developed
-CURRENT branch toward the next
generation of FreeBSD. See What is
FreeBSD-CURRENT? for more information on this
branch.

1.10.

When are FreeBSD releases made?

The Release Engineering Team <re@FreeBSD.org> releases a new major version of FreeBSD about
every 18 months and a new minor version about every 8
months, on average. Release dates are announced well in
advance, so that the people working on the system know
when their projects need to be finished and tested. A
testing period precedes each release, to ensure that the
addition of new features does not compromise the stability
of the release. Many users regard this caution as one of
the best things about FreeBSD, even though waiting for all
the latest goodies to reach -STABLE
can be a little frustrating.

More information on the release engineering process
(including a schedule of upcoming releases) can be found
on the release
engineering pages on the FreeBSD Web site.

For people who need or want a little more excitement,
binary snapshots are made weekly as discussed
above.

1.11.

Who is responsible for FreeBSD?

The key decisions concerning the FreeBSD project, such as
the overall direction of the project and who is allowed to
add code to the source tree, are made by a core
team of 9 people. There is a much larger team of
more than 350 committers
who are authorized to make changes directly to the FreeBSD
source tree.

However, most non-trivial changes are discussed in
advance in the mailing
lists, and there are no restrictions on who may
take part in the discussion.

1.12.

Where can I get FreeBSD?

Every significant release of FreeBSD is available via
anonymous FTP from the FreeBSD
FTP site:

Is the documentation available in other formats, such
as plain text (ASCII), or PostScriptÂ®?

Yes. The documentation is available in a number of
different formats and compression schemes on the FreeBSD FTP
site, in the /pub/FreeBSD/doc/
directory.

The documentation is categorized in a number of
different ways. These include:

The document's name, such as
faq, or
handbook.

The document's language and encoding. These are
based on the locale names found under
/usr/share/locale on a FreeBSD
system. The current languages and encodings
are as follows:

Name

Meaning

en_US.ISO8859-1

English (United States)

bn_BD.ISO10646-1

Bengali or Bangla (Bangladesh)

da_DK.ISO8859-1

Danish (Denmark)

de_DE.ISO8859-1

German (Germany)

el_GR.ISO8859-7

Greek (Greece)

es_ES.ISO8859-1

Spanish (Spain)

fr_FR.ISO8859-1

French (France)

hu_HU.ISO8859-2

Hungarian (Hungary)

it_IT.ISO8859-15

Italian (Italy)

ja_JP.eucJP

Japanese (Japan, EUC encoding)

mn_MN.UTF-8

Mongolian (Mongolia, UTF-8
encoding)

nl_NL.ISO8859-1

Dutch (Netherlands)

no_NO.ISO8859-1

Norwegian (Norway)

pl_PL.ISO8859-2

Polish (Poland)

pt_BR.ISO8859-1

Portuguese (Brazil)

ru_RU.KOI8-R

Russian (Russia, KOI8-R encoding)

sr_YU.ISO8859-2

Serbian (Serbia)

tr_TR.ISO8859-9

Turkish (Turkey)

zh_CN.UTF-8

Simplified Chinese (China, UTF-8
encoding)

zh_TW.UTF-8

Traditional Chinese (Taiwan, UTF-8
encoding)

Note:

Some documents may not be available in all
languages.

The document's format. We produce the
documentation in a number of different output formats.
Each format has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Some formats are better suited for online reading,
while others are meant to be aesthetically pleasing
when printed on paper. Having the documentation
available in any of these formats ensures that our
readers will be able to read the parts they are
interested in, either on their monitor, or on paper
after printing the documents. The currently available
formats are:

Format

Meaning

html-split

A collection of small, linked, HTML
files.

html

One large HTML file containing the entire
document

pdf

Adobe's Portable Document Format

ps

PostScriptÂ®

rtf

MicrosoftÂ®'s Rich Text Format

txt

Plain text

Note:

Page numbers are not automatically updated when
loading Rich Text Format into Word. Press Ctrl+A,
Ctrl+End,
F9 after loading the document, to
update the page numbers.

The compression and packaging scheme.

Where the format is
html-split, the files are
bundled up using tar(1). The resulting
.tar file is then compressed
using the compression schemes detailed in the next
point.

All the other formats generate one file. For
example,
article.pdf,
book.html, and so on.

These files are then compressed using either
the zip or
bz2 compression schemes.
tar(1) can be used to uncompress these
files.

So the PostScriptÂ® version of the Handbook,
compressed using bzip2 will be
stored in a file called
book.ps.bz2 in the
handbook/ directory.

After choosing the format and compression mechanism,
download the
compressed files, uncompress them, and then copy
the appropriate documents into place.

For example, the split HTML version of the
FAQ, compressed using bzip2(1),
can be found in
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.bz2
To download and uncompress that file, type:

If the file is compressed,
tar will automatically
detect the appropriate format and decompress it correctly,
resulting in a collection of
.html files. The main one is called
index.html, which will contain the
table of contents, introductory material, and links to the
other parts of the document.

2.3.

Where do I find info on the FreeBSD mailing lists? What
FreeBSD news groups are available?

Channel #FreeBSDhelp on EFNet
is a channel dedicated to helping FreeBSD users.

Channel #FreeBSD on Freenode is
a general help channel with many users at any time.
The conversations have been known to run off-topic for
a while, but priority is given to users with FreeBSD
questions. Other users can help with
the basics, referring to the Handbook whenever
possible and providing links for learning more about
a particular topic. This is primarily an English
speaking channel, though it does have users from all
over the world. Non-native English speakers should
try to ask the question in English first and then
relocate to ##freebsd-lang as
appropriate.

Channel #FreeBSD on DALNET is
available at irc.dal.net in
the US and irc.eu.dal.net in
Europe.

Channel #FreeBSD on UNDERNET
is available at
us.undernet.org in the US and
eu.undernet.org in Europe.
Since it is a help channel, be prepared to read the
documents you are referred to.

Channel #FreeBSD on RUSNET
is a Russian language channel dedicated to
helping FreeBSD users. This is also good place for
non-technical discussions.

Channel #bsdchat on Freenode is
a Traditional Chinese (UTF-8 encoding) language
channel dedicated to helping FreeBSD users.
This is also good place for non-technical
discussions.

Which platform should I download? I have a 64
bit capable IntelÂ® CPU,
but I only see amd64.

amd64 is the term FreeBSD uses for 64-bit
compatible x86 architectures (also known as "x86-64" or
"x64"). Most modern computers should use amd64.
Older hardware should use i386. When installing
on a non-x86-compatible architecture, select the
platform which best matches the hardware.

3.2.

Which file do I download to get FreeBSD?

On the Getting
FreeBSD page, select [iso] next
to the architecture that matches the hardware.

Any of the following can be used:

file

description

disc1.iso

Contains enough to install FreeBSD and
a minimal set of packages.

dvd1.iso

Similar to disc1.iso
but with additional packages.

memstick.img

A bootable image sufficient for writing to a
USB stick.

bootonly.iso

A minimal image that requires network access
during installation to completely install
FreeBSD.

pc98 users require these floppy images:
floppies/boot.flp,
floppies/kern1.flp,
floppies/kern2.flp, and
floppies/mfsroot1.flp. These images
need to be written onto floppies by tools like
dd(1).

This can be caused by not downloading the image in
binary mode when using
FTP.

Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to
ascii and attempt to change any
end-of-line characters received to match the
conventions used by the client's system. This will
almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the
SHA-256 checksum of the downloaded boot image: if it
is not exactly that on the
server, then the download process is suspect.

When using a command line FTP client, type
binary at the FTP command prompt
after getting connected to the server and before
starting the download of the image.

FreeBSD requires a 486 or better PC,
64Â MB or more of RAM, and at least 1.1 GB of hard
disk space.

3.6.

How can I make my own custom release or install
disk?

Customized FreeBSD installation media can be created by
building a custom release. Follow the instructions in the
Release
Engineering article.

3.7.

Can WindowsÂ® co-exist with FreeBSD?

If WindowsÂ® is installed first, then yes. FreeBSD's
boot manager will then manage to boot WindowsÂ® and FreeBSD.
If WindowsÂ® is installed afterwards, it will
overwrite the boot manager. If that
happens, see the next section.

3.8.

Another operating system destroyed my Boot Manager.
How do I get it back?

This depends upon the boot manager.
The FreeBSD boot selection menu can be reinstalled using
boot0cfg(8). For example, to restore the boot menu
onto the disk ada0:

I booted from a CD, but the install program
says no CD-ROM is found. Where did it go?

The usual cause of this problem is a mis-configured
CD-ROM drive. Many PCs now ship with the CD-ROM as the
slave device on the secondary IDE controller, with no
master device on that controller. This is illegal
according to the ATAPI specification, but WindowsÂ® plays
fast and loose with the specification, and the BIOS
ignores it when booting. This is why the BIOS was able to
see the CD-ROM to boot from it, but why FreeBSD cannot see it
to complete the install.

Reconfigure the system so that the CD-ROM is either
the master device on the IDE controller it is attached to,
or make sure that it is the slave on an IDE controller
that also has a master device.

3.10.

Do I need to install the source?

In general, no. There is nothing in the base system
which requires the presence of the source to operate.
Some ports, like sysutils/lsof, will
not build unless the source is installed. In particular,
if the port builds a kernel module or directly operates on
kernel structures, the source must be installed.

3.11.

Do I need to build a kernel?

Usually not. The supplied GENERIC
kernel contains the drivers an ordinary computer will
need. freebsd-update(8), the FreeBSD binary upgrade
tool, cannot upgrade custom kernels, another reason to
stick with the GENERIC kernel when
possible. For computers with very limited RAM, such as
embedded systems, it may be worthwhile to build a smaller
custom kernel containing just the required drivers.

3.12.

Should I use DES, Blowfish, or MD5 passwords and how
do I specify which form my users receive?

FreeBSDÂ 9 and later use
SHA512 by
default. DES
passwords are still available for backwards compatibility
with legacy operating systems which still
use the less secure password format. FreeBSD also supports
the Blowfish and MD5 password formats. Which
password format to use for new passwords is controlled by
the passwd_format login capability in
/etc/login.conf, which takes values
of des, blf (if
these are available) or md5. See the
login.conf(5) manual page for more information about
login capabilities.

3.13.

What are the limits for FFS file systems?

For FFS file systems, the largest file system is
practically limited by the amount of memory required to
fsck(8) the file system. fsck(8) requires one
bit per fragment, which with the default fragment size of
4Â KB equates to 32Â MB of memory per TB of disk.
This does mean that on architectures which limit userland
processes to 2Â GB (e.g., i386™), the maximum
fsck(8)'able filesystem is ~60Â TB.

I want to get a piece of hardware for my FreeBSD
system. Which model/brand/type is best?

This is discussed continually on the FreeBSD mailing
lists but is to be expected since hardware changes so
quickly. Read through the HardwareÂ Notes
for FreeBSD 10.1
or 9.3
and search the mailing list archives
before asking about the latest and greatest hardware.
Chances are a discussion about that type of hardware
took place just last week.

What are the limits for memory? Does FreeBSD support
more than 4Â GB of memory
(RAM)? More than 16Â GB? More than
48Â GB?

FreeBSD as an operating system generally supports
as much physical memory (RAM) as the platform it is
running on does. Keep in mind that different platforms
have different limits for memory; for example i386™
without PAE supports at most
4Â GB of memory (and usually less than that because
of PCI address space) and i386™ with PAE supports at
most 64Â GB memory. As of FreeBSDÂ 10, AMD64
platforms support up to 4Â TB of physical
memory.

4.1.3.

Why does FreeBSD report less than 4Â GB memory when
installed on an i386™ machine?

The total address space on i386™ machines is
32-bit, meaning that at most 4Â GB of memory is
addressable (can be accessed). Furthermore, some
addresses in this range are reserved by hardware for
different purposes, for example for using and
controlling PCI devices, for accessing video memory, and
so on. Therefore, the total amount of memory usable by
the operating system for its kernel and applications is
limited to significantly less than 4Â GB. Usually,
3.2Â GB to 3.7Â GB is the maximum usable
physical memory in this configuration.

To access more than 3.2Â GB to 3.7Â GB of
installed memory (meaning up to 4Â GB but also more
than 4Â GB), a special tweak called
PAE must be used. PAE stands for
Physical Address Extension and is a way for 32-bit x86
CPUs to address more than 4Â GB of memory. It
remaps the memory that would otherwise be overlaid by
address reservations for hardware devices above the
4Â GB range and uses it as additional physical
memory (see pae(4)). Using PAE has some drawbacks;
this mode of memory access is a little bit slower than
the normal (without PAE) mode and loadable modules (see
kld(4)) are not supported. This means all drivers
must be compiled into the kernel.

The most common way to enable PAE is to build a new
kernel with the special ready-provided kernel
configuration file called PAE,
which is already configured to build a safe kernel.
Note that some entries in this kernel configuration file
are too conservative and some drivers marked as unready
to be used with PAE are actually usable. A rule of
thumb is that if the driver is usable on 64-bit
architectures (like AMD64), it is also usable with PAE.
When creating a custom kernel configuration
file, PAE can be enabled by adding the following
line:

options PAE

PAE is not much used nowadays because most new x86
hardware also supports running in 64-bit mode, known as
AMD64 or IntelÂ®Â 64. It has a much larger address
space and does not need such tweaks. FreeBSD supports
AMD64 and it is recommended that this version of FreeBSD be
used instead of the i386™ version if 4Â GB or more
memory is required.

Yes. FreeBSD divides support into multiple tiers.
Tier 1 architectures, such as i386 or amd64; are fully
supported. Tiers 2 and 3 are supported on an
if-possible basis. A full explanation of the tier
system is available in the Committer's
Guide.

A complete list of supported architectures can be
found on the platforms
page.

4.2.2.

Does FreeBSD support Symmetric Multiprocessing
(SMP)?

FreeBSD supports symmetric multi-processor (SMP) on all
non-embedded platforms (e.g, i386, amd64,
etc.). SMP is also supported in arm and MIPS kernels,
although some CPUs may not support this. FreeBSD's SMP
implementation uses fine-grained locking, and
performance scales nearly linearly with number of
CPUs.

FreeBSD supports EIDE, SATA, SCSI, and SAS drives (with
a compatible controller; see the next section), and all
drives using the original “Western Digital”
interface (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and of course IDE). A few
ESDI controllers that use proprietary interfaces may not
work: stick to WD1002/3/6/7 interfaces and
clones.

FreeBSD supports SCSI changers using the ch(4)
device and the chio(1) command. The details of how
to control the changer can be found in
chio(1).

While
AMANDA and some other
products already understands changers, other
applications only know how to move a tape from one point
to another. In this case, keep track of which slot a
tape is in and which slot the tape currently in the
drive needs to go back to.

4.3.5.

Which CD-ROM and CD-RW drives are supported by
FreeBSD?

Any SCSI drive connected to a supported controller
is supported. Most ATAPI compatible IDE CD-ROMs are
supported.

FreeBSD supports any ATAPI-compatible IDE CD-R or CD-RW
drive. See burncd(8) for details.

FreeBSD also supports any SCSI CD-R or CD-RW drives.
Install the sysutils/cdrtools port or
package, then use cdrecord.

The default console driver,
syscons(4), provides the ability to use a mouse
pointer in text consoles to cut & paste text. Run
the mouse daemon, moused(8), and turn on the mouse
pointer in the virtual console:

#moused -p /dev/xxxx -t yyyy#vidcontrol -m on

Where xxxx is the mouse
device name and yyyy is a
protocol type for the mouse. The mouse daemon can
automatically determine the protocol type of most mice,
except old serial mice. Specify the
auto protocol to invoke automatic
detection. If automatic detection does not work, see
the moused(8) manual page for a list of supported
protocol types.

For a PS/2 mouse, add
moused_enable="YES" to
/etc/rc.conf to start the mouse
daemon at boot time. Additionally, to
use the mouse daemon on all virtual terminals instead of
just the console, add allscreens_flags="-m
on" to
/etc/rc.conf.

When the mouse daemon is running, access to the
mouse must be coordinated between the mouse daemon and
other programs such as X Windows. Refer to the
FAQWhy does my mouse not work
with X? for more details on this issue.

4.4.2.

How do I cut and paste text with a mouse in the text
console?

It is not possible to remove data using the mouse.
However, it is possible to copy and paste. Once the
mouse daemon is running as described in the previous question, hold down
button 1 (left button) and move the mouse to select a
region of text. Then, press button 2 (middle button) to
paste it at the text cursor. Pressing button 3 (right
button) will “extend” the selected region
of text.

If the mouse does not have a middle button, it is
possible to emulate one or remap buttons using mouse
daemon options. See the moused(8) manual page for
details.

4.4.3.

My mouse has a fancy wheel and buttons. Can I use
them in FreeBSD?

The answer is, unfortunately, “It
depends”. These mice with additional features
require specialized driver in most cases. Unless the
mouse device driver or the user program has specific
support for the mouse, it will act just like a standard
two, or three button mouse.

For the possible usage of wheels in the X Window
environment, refer to that section.

4.4.4.

How do I use my delete key in sh
and csh?

For the Bourne Shell, add
the following lines to ~/.shrc.
See sh(1) and editrc(5).

The most likely reason is the difference between
physical memory addresses and virtual addresses.

The convention for most PC hardware is to use the
memory area between 3.5Â GB and 4Â GB for a
special purpose (usually for PCI). This address space is
used to access PCI hardware. As a result real, physical
memory cannot be accessed by that address space.

What happens to the memory that should appear in that
location is hardware dependent. Unfortunately,
some hardware does nothing and the ability to use that
last 500Â MB of RAM is entirely lost.

Luckily, most hardware remaps the memory to a higher
location so that it can still be used. However, this can
cause some confusion when watching the boot
messages.

On a 32-bit version of FreeBSD, the memory appears lost,
since it will be remapped above 4Â GB, which a 32-bit
kernel is unable to access. In this case, the solution is
to build a PAE enabled kernel. See the entry on memory
limits for more information.

On a 64-bit version of FreeBSD, or when running a
PAE-enabled kernel, FreeBSD will correctly detect and remap
the memory so it is usable. During boot, however, it may
seem as if FreeBSD is detecting more memory than the system
really has, due to the described remapping. This is
normal and the available memory will be corrected as the
boot process completes.

5.2.

Why do my programs occasionally die with
Signal 11 errors?

Signal 11 errors are caused when a process has
attempted to access memory which the operating system has
not granted it access to. If something like this is
happening at seemingly random intervals,
start investigating the cause.

These problems can usually be attributed to
either:

If the problem is occurring only in a specific
custom application, it is
probably a bug in the code.

If it is a problem with part of the base FreeBSD
system, it may also be buggy code, but more often than
not these problems are found and fixed long before us
general FAQ readers get to use
these bits of code (that is what -CURRENT is
for).

It is probably
not a FreeBSD bug if the
problem occurs compiling a program, but the activity
that the compiler is carrying out changes each
time.

For example, if make
buildworld fails while trying
to compile ls.c into
ls.o and, when run again, it fails
in the same place, this is a broken build. Try
updating source and try again. If the compile fails
elsewhere, it is almost certainly due to hardware.

In the first case, use a debugger such as
gdb(1) to find the point in the program which is
attempting to access a bogus address and fix
it.

In the second case, verify which piece of
hardware is at fault.

Common causes of this include:

The hard disks might be overheating: Check that
the fans are still working, as the disk and
other hardware might be overheating.

The processor running is overheating: This might
be because the processor has been overclocked, or the
fan on the processor might have died. In either case,
ensure that the hardware is running at
what it is specified to run at, at least while trying
to solve this problem. If it is not, clock it back
to the default settings.)

Regarding overclocking, it is far
cheaper to have a slow system than a fried system that
needs replacing! Also the community is not
sympathetic to problems on overclocked systems.

Dodgy memory: if multiple memory
SIMMS/DIMMS are installed, pull them all out and try
running the machine with each SIMM or DIMM
individually to narrow the problem down to either the
problematic DIMM/SIMM or perhaps even a
combination.

Over-optimistic motherboard settings: the BIOS
settings, and some motherboard jumpers, provide
options to set various timings. The defaults
are often sufficient, but sometimes setting the wait
states on RAM too low, or setting the “RAM
Speed: Turbo” option
will cause strange behavior. A possible idea is to
set to BIOS defaults, after noting
the current settings first.

Unclean or insufficient power to the motherboard.
Remove any unused I/O boards, hard disks, or
CD-ROMs,
or disconnect the power cable from them, to see if
the power supply can manage a smaller load. Or try
another power supply, preferably one with a little
more power. For instance, if the current power supply
is rated at 250Â Watts, try one rated at
300Â Watts.

Read the section on
Signal 11 for a further
explanation and a discussion on how memory testing
software or hardware can still pass faulty memory. There
is an extensive FAQ on this at the SIG11
problem FAQ.

Finally, if none of this has helped, it is possibly
a bug in FreeBSD.
Follow these instructions
to send a problem report.

5.3.

My system crashes with either Fatal trap
12: page fault in kernel mode, or
panic:, and spits out a bunch of
information. What should I do?

The FreeBSD developers are interested in these
errors, but need more information than just the error
message. Copy the full crash message. Then consult the
FAQ section on kernel
panics, build a debugging kernel, and get a
backtrace. This might sound difficult, but does not
require any programming skills. Just follow the
instructions.

5.4.

What is the meaning of the error maxproc
limit exceeded by uid %i, please see tuning(7) and
login.conf(5)?

The FreeBSD kernel will only allow a certain number of
processes to exist at one time. The number is based on
the kern.maxuserssysctl(8)
variable. kern.maxusers also affects
various other in-kernel limits, such as network buffers.
If the machine is heavily loaded,
increase kern.maxusers. This will
increase these other system limits in addition to the
maximum number of processes.

To adjust the kern.maxusers value,
see the File/Process
Limits section of the Handbook. While that
section refers to open files, the same limits apply to
processes.

If the machine is lightly loaded but running a very
large number of processes, adjust the
kern.maxproc tunable by defining it in
/boot/loader.conf. The tunable will
not get adjusted until the system is rebooted. For more
information about tuning tunables, see
loader.conf(5). If these processes are being run by
a single user, adjust
kern.maxprocperuid to be one less than
the new kern.maxproc value. It must
be at least one less because one system program,
init(8), must always be running.

5.5.

Why do full screen applications on remote machines
misbehave?

The remote machine may be setting the terminal type to
something other than xterm which is
required by the FreeBSD console. Alternatively the kernel
may have the wrong values for the width and height of the
terminal.

Check the value of the TERM
environment variable is xterm. If the
remote machine does not support that try
vt100.

Run stty -a to check what the
kernel thinks the terminal dimensions are. If they are
incorrect, they can be changed by running
stty rows RR cols
CC.

Alternatively, if the client machine has
x11/xterm installed, then running
resize will query the terminal for the
correct dimensions and set them.

5.6.

Why does it take so long to connect to my computer via
ssh or
telnet?

The symptom: there is a long delay between the time
the TCP connection is established and the time when the
client software asks for a password (or, in
telnet(1)'s case, when a login prompt
appears).

The problem: more likely than not, the delay is caused
by the server software trying to resolve the client's IP
address into a hostname. Many servers, including the
Telnet and
SSH servers that come with
FreeBSD, do this to store the hostname in a log file for
future reference by the administrator.

The remedy: if the problem occurs whenever connecting
the client computer to any server, the problem
is with the client. If the problem only occurs
when someone connects to the server computer, the
problem is with the server.

If the problem is with the client, the only remedy is
to fix the DNS so the server can resolve it. If this is
on a local network, consider it a server problem and keep
reading. If this is on the Internet,
contact your ISP.

If the problem is with the server on a
local network, configure the server
to resolve address-to-hostname queries for the local
address range. See hosts(5) and named(8)
for more information. If this is on the
Internet, the problem may be that the local server's
resolver is not functioning correctly. To check, try to
look up another host such as
www.yahoo.com. If it does not
work, that is the problem.

Following a fresh install of FreeBSD, it is also possible
that domain and name server information is missing from
/etc/resolv.conf. This will often
cause a delay in SSH, as the
option UseDNS is set to
yes by default in
/etc/ssh/sshd_config. If this is
causing the problem, either fill in the
missing information in
/etc/resolv.conf or set
UseDNS to no in
sshd_config as a temporary
workaround.

This error message indicates that the number of
available file descriptors have been exhausted on the
system. Refer to the kern.maxfiles
section of the Tuning
Kernel Limits section of the Handbook for a
discussion and solution.

5.8.

Why does the clock on my computer keep incorrect
time?

The computer has two or more clocks, and FreeBSD has
chosen to use the wrong one.

Run dmesg(8), and check for lines that contain
Timecounter. The one with the highest
quality value that FreeBSD chose.

It may be a broken ACPI timer. The simplest solution
is to disable the ACPI timer in
/boot/loader.conf:

debug.acpi.disabled="timer"

Or the BIOS may modify the TSC clock—perhaps to
change the speed of the processor when running from
batteries, or going into a power saving mode, but FreeBSD is
unaware of these adjustments, and appears to gain or lose
time.

In this example, the i8254 clock is
also available, and can be selected by writing its name to
the kern.timecounter.hardwaresysctl(3).

To have this change automatically run at boot time,
add the following line to
/etc/sysctl.conf:

kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254

5.9.

What does the error swap_pager: indefinite
wait buffer: mean?

This means that a process is trying to page memory to
disk, and the page attempt has hung trying to access the
disk for more than 20 seconds. It might be caused by bad
blocks on the disk drive, disk wiring, cables, or any
other disk I/O-related hardware. If the drive itself is
bad, disk errors will appear in
/var/log/messages and in the output
of dmesg. Otherwise, check the cables
and connections.

5.10.

What is a lock order
reversal?

The FreeBSD kernel uses a number of resource locks to
arbitrate contention for certain resources. When multiple
kernel threads try to obtain multiple resource locks,
there's always the potential for a deadlock, where two
threads have each obtained one of the locks and blocks
forever waiting for the other thread to release one of the
other locks. This sort of locking problem can be avoided
if all threads obtain the locks in the same order.

A run-time lock diagnostic system called
witness(4), enabled in FreeBSD-CURRENT and disabled by
default for stable branches and releases, detects the
potential for deadlocks due to locking errors, including
errors caused by obtaining multiple resource locks with a
different order from different parts of the kernel. The
witness(4) framework tries to detect this problem as
it happens, and reports it by printing a message to the
system console about a lock order
reversal (often referred to also as
LOR).

It is possible to get false positives, as
witness(4) is conservative. A true positive report
does not mean that a system is
dead-locked; instead it should be understood as a warning
that a deadlock could have happened here.

Note:

Problematic LORs tend to get
fixed quickly, so check http://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current before posting
to the mailing lists.

5.11.

What does Called ... with the following
non-sleepable locks held mean?

This means that a function that may sleep was called
while a mutex (or other unsleepable) lock was held.

The reason this is an error is because mutexes are not
intended to be held for long periods of time; they are
supposed to only be held to maintain short periods of
synchronization. This programming contract allows device
drivers to use mutexes to synchronize with the rest of the
kernel during interrupts. Interrupts (under FreeBSD) may not
sleep. Hence it is imperative that no subsystem in the
kernel block for an extended period while holding a
mutex.

To catch such errors, assertions may be added to the
kernel that interact with the witness(4) subsystem to
emit a warning or fatal error (depending on the system
configuration) when a potentially blocking call is made
while holding a mutex.

In summary, such warnings are non-fatal, however with
unfortunate timing they could cause undesirable effects
ranging from a minor blip in the system's responsiveness
to a complete system lockup.

Why does
buildworld/installworld
die with the message touch: not
found?

This error does not mean that the touch(1)
utility is missing. The error is instead probably due to
the dates of the files being set sometime in the future.
If the CMOS clock is set to local time, run
adjkerntzÂ -i to adjust
the kernel clock when booting into single-user
mode.

Refer to the ports
page for info on software packages ported to
FreeBSD. The list currently tops 24,000 and is
growing daily, so come back to check often or subscribe to
the FreeBSD announcements mailing list for periodic updates on new
entries.

Most ports should work on all supported versions of
FreeBSD. Those that do not are specifically marked as such.
Each time a FreeBSD release is made, a snapshot of the ports
tree at the time of release in also included in the
ports/ directory.

FreeBSD supports compressed binary packages to easily
install and uninstall ports. Use pkg(7) to control
the installation of packages.

If the installed FreeBSD version lags
significantly behind -CURRENT or
-STABLE, update the
Ports Collection using the instructions in Using
the Ports Collection. If the system is
up-to-date, someone might have committed a change to the
port which works for -CURRENT but
which broke the port for -STABLE.
Submit
a bug report, since the Ports Collection is supposed to
work
for both the -CURRENT and
-STABLE branches.

6.5.

I just tried to build INDEX using
make index, and it failed. Why?

First, make sure that the Ports Collection is
up-to-date. Errors that affect building
INDEX from an up-to-date copy of the
Ports Collection are high-visibility and are thus almost
always fixed immediately.

There are rare cases where INDEX
will not build due to odd cases involving
WITH_* or
WITHOUT_*
variables being set in make.conf. If
you suspect that this is the case, try to make
INDEX with those make variables
turned off before reporting it to FreeBSD ports mailing list.

6.6.

I updated the sources, now how do I update my
installed ports?

FreeBSD does not include a port upgrading tool, but it
does have some tools to make the upgrade process somewhat
easier. Additional tools are available to simplify
port handling and are described the Upgrading
Ports section in the FreeBSD Handbook.

6.7.

Do I need to recompile every port each time I perform
a major version update?

Yes! While a recent system will run with
software compiled under an older release,
things will randomly crash and fail to work once
other ports are installed or updated.

When the system is upgraded, various shared libraries,
loadable modules, and other parts of the system will be
replaced with newer versions. Applications linked against
the older versions may fail to start or, in other cases,
fail to function properly.

Do I need to recompile every port each time I perform
a minor version update?

In general, no. FreeBSD developers do their utmost to
guarantee binary compatibility across all releases with
the same major version number. Any exceptions will be
documented in the Release Notes, and advice given there
should be followed.

6.9.

Why is /bin/sh so minimal? Why
does FreeBSD not use bash or another
shell?

Many people need to write shell scripts which will be
portable across many systems. That is why POSIXÂ®
specifies the shell and utility commands in great detail.
Most scripts are written in Bourne shell (sh(1)), and
because several important programming interfaces
(make(1), system(3), popen(3), and
analogues in higher-level scripting languages like Perl
and Tcl) are specified to use the Bourne shell to
interpret commands. Because the Bourne shell is so often
and widely used, it is important for it to be quick to
start, be deterministic in its behavior, and have a small
memory footprint.

The existing implementation is our best effort at
meeting as many of these requirements simultaneously as we
can. To keep /bin/sh small, we have
not provided many of the convenience features that other
shells have. That is why other more featureful shells
like bash, scsh,
tcsh(1), and zsh are available.
Compare the memory utilization of
these shells by looking at the “VSZ” and
“RSS” columns in a ps -u
listing.

6.10.

How do I create audio CDs from my MIDI files?

To create audio CDs from MIDI files, first install
audio/timidity++ from ports then
install manually the GUS patches set by Eric A. Welsh,
available at http://alleg.sourceforge.net/digmid.html.
After TiMidity++ has been
installed properly, MIDI files may be converted to WAV
files with the following command line:

%timidity -Ow -s 44100 -o /tmp/juke/01.wav 01.mid

The WAV files can then be converted to other formats
or burned onto audio CDs, as described in the FreeBSD
Handbook.

Note:

The new kernel will be
installed to the /boot/kernel
directory along with its modules, while the old kernel
and its modules will be moved to the
/boot/kernel.old directory. If
a mistake is made in the
configuration, simply boot the previous version of the
kernel.

7.2.

Why is my kernel so big?

GENERIC kernels shipped with FreeBSD
and later are compiled in debug mode.
Kernels built in debug mode contain many symbols in
separate files that are used for debugging, thus greatly
increasing the size of /boot/kernel/.
Note that there will be little or no performance loss from
running a debug kernel, and it is useful to keep one
around in case of a system panic.

However, when running low on disk space, there
are different options to reduce the size of
/boot/kernel/.

To not install the symbol files,
make sure the following line exists in
/etc/src.conf:

Either of the above settings will cause the kernel to
be built in debug mode.

To build and install only the specified modules, list
them in
/etc/make.conf:

MODULES_OVERRIDE= accf_http ipfw

Replace accf_httpd ipfw with a
list of needed modules. Only the listed modules will be
built. This reduces the size of the kernel
directory and decreases the amount of time needed to
build the kernel. For more information, read
/usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf.

Unneeded devices can be removed from the kernel
to further reduce the size. See Q:Â 7.1 for more information.

To put any of these options into effect, follow the
instructions to build
and install the new kernel.

Most kernels
(/boot/kernel/kernel) tend to be
around 12Â MB to 16Â MB.

7.3.

Why does every kernel I try to build fail to compile,
even GENERIC?

There are a number of possible causes for this
problem:

The source
tree is different from the one used to build the
currently running system. When attempting an upgrade,
read /usr/src/UPDATING, paying
particular attention to the “COMMON
ITEMS” section at the end.

The make
buildkernel command did not complete
successfully. The make
buildkernel target relies on files
generated by the make buildworld
target to complete its job correctly.

Even when building FreeBSD-STABLE, it is possible
that the source tree was fetched at a time when it was
either being modified or it was broken.
Only releases are guaranteed to be
buildable, although FreeBSD-STABLE builds fine the
majority of the time. Try re-fetching the source tree
and see if the problem goes away. Try using a
different mirror in case the previous one is having
problems.

7.4.

Which scheduler is in use on a
running system?

The name of the scheduler currently being used is
directly available as the value of the
kern.sched.name sysctl:

% sysctl kern.sched.name
kern.sched.name: ULE

7.5.

What is kern.sched.quantum?

kern.sched.quantum is the maximum
number of ticks a process can run without being preempted
in the 4BSD scheduler.

The best way is to reinstall the operating system on
the new disk, then move the user data over. This is
highly recommended when tracking
-STABLE for more than one release or
when updating a release instead of installing a new one.
Install booteasy on both disks with boot0cfg(8) and
dual boot until you are happy with the new configuration.
Skip the next paragraph to find out how to move the data
after doing this.

Alternatively, partition and label the new disk with
either sade(8) or gpart(8). If the disks are
MBR-formatted, booteasy can be installed on both disks
with boot0cfg(8) so that the computer can dual boot
to the old or new system after the copying is done.

Once the new disk set up,
the data cannot just be copied. Instead, use tools that
understand device files and system flags, such as
dump(8). Although it is recommended
to move the data while in single-user mode, it
is not required.

When the disks are formatted with
UFS, never use anything but
dump(8) and restore(8) to move the root file
system. These commands should also be used when moving a
single partition to another empty partition. The sequence
of steps to use dump to move the data
from one UFS partitions to a new
partition is:

newfs the new partition.

mount it on a temporary mount
point.

cd to that directory.

dump the old partition, piping
output to the new one.

For example, to move
/dev/ada1s1a with
/mnt as the temporary mount point,
type:

Rearranging partitions with
dump takes a bit more work. To merge a
partition like /var into its parent,
create the new partition large enough for both, move the
parent partition as described above, then move the child
partition into the empty directory that the first move
created:

To split a directory from its parent, say putting
/var on its own partition when it was
not before, create both partitions, then mount the child
partition on the appropriate directory in the temporary
mount point, then move the old single partition:

The cpio(1) and pax(1) utilities are also
available for moving user data. These are known to lose
file flag information, so use them with caution.

8.3.

Which partitions can safely use Soft Updates? I have
heard that Soft Updates on / can
cause problems. What about Journaled Soft Updates?

Short answer: Soft Updates can usually be safely used
on all partitions.

Long answer: Soft Updates has two characteristics
that may be undesirable on certain partitions. First, a
Soft Updates partition has a small chance of losing data
during a system crash. The partition will not be
corrupted as the data will simply be lost. Second, Soft
Updates can cause temporary space shortages.

When using Soft Updates, the kernel can take up to
thirty seconds to write changes to the physical disk.
When a large file is deleted the file still resides on
disk until the kernel actually performs the deletion.
This can cause a very simple race condition. Suppose
one large file is deleted and another large file is
immediately created. The first large file is not yet
actually removed from the physical disk, so the disk might
not have enough room for the second large file. This will
produce an error that the partition does not have enough
space, even though a large chunk of space has just been
released. A few seconds later, the file creation works as
expected.

If a system should crash after the kernel accepts a
chunk of data for writing to disk, but before that data is
actually written out, data could be lost. This risk is
extremely small, but generally manageable.

These issues affect all partitions using Soft Updates.
So, what does this mean for the root partition?

Vital information on the root partition changes very
rarely. If the system crashed during the thirty-second
window after such a change is made, it is possible that
data could be lost. This risk is negligible for most
applications, but be aware that it exists. If
the system cannot tolerate this much risk, do not use
Soft Updates on the root file system!

/ is traditionally one of the
smallest partitions. If
/tmp is on
/, there may be intermittent
space problems. Symlinking /tmp to
/var/tmp will solve this
problem.

Finally, dump(8) does not work in live mode (-L)
on a filesystem, with Journaled Soft Updates
(SU+J).

8.4.

Can I mount other foreign file systems under
FreeBSD?

FreeBSD supports a variety of other file systems.

UFS

UFS CD-ROMs can be mounted directly on FreeBSD.
Mounting disk partitions from Digital UNIX and other
systems that support UFS may be more complex,
depending on the details of the disk partitioning
for the operating system in question.

ext2/ext3

FreeBSD supports ext2fs and
ext3fs partitions. See
ext2fs(5) for more information.

FreeBSD includes a read-write FAT driver. For more
information, see mount_msdosfs(8).

ZFS

FreeBSD includes a port of Sun™'s ZFS driver. The
current recommendation is to use it only on
amd64 platforms with sufficient memory. For
more information, see zfs(8).

FreeBSD includes the Network File System
NFS and the FreeBSD Ports Collection
provides several FUSE applications to support many other
file systems.

8.5.

How do I mount a secondary DOS partition?

The secondary DOS partitions are found after
all the primary partitions. For
example, if E is the
second DOS partition on the second SCSI drive, there will
be a device file for “slice 5” in
/dev. To mount it:

To boot FreeBSD using GRUB,
add the following to either
/boot/grub/menu.lst or
/boot/grub/grub.conf, depending upon
which is used by the LinuxÂ® distribution.

title FreeBSD 9.1
root (hd0,a)
kernel /boot/loader

Where hd0,a points to the
root partition on the first disk. To specify
the slice number, use something like this
(hd0,2,a). By default, if the
slice number is omitted, GRUB
searches the first slice
which has the a partition.

8.8.

How do I boot FreeBSD and LinuxÂ® using
BootEasy?

Install LILO at the start of the LinuxÂ® boot
partition instead of in the Master Boot Record. You can
then boot LILO from
BootEasy.

This is recommended when running WindowsÂ® and LinuxÂ®
as it makes it simpler to get LinuxÂ® booting again if
WindowsÂ® is reinstalled.

8.9.

How do I change the boot prompt from
??? to something more
meaningful?

This cannot be accomplished with the standard boot
manager without rewriting it. There are a number of other
boot managers in the sysutils
category of the Ports Collection.

8.10.

How do I use a new removable drive?

If the drive already has a file system on it,
use a command like this:

#mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt

If the drive will only be used with FreeBSD systems,
partition it with UFS or
ZFS. This will provide long filename
support, improvement in performance, and stability. If
the drive will be used by other operating systems, a more
portable choice, such as msdosfs, is better.

Trying to mount an audio CD will produce an error
like cd9660: /dev/acd0c: Invalid
argument. This is because
mount only works on file systems.
Audio CDs do not have file systems; they just have data.
Instead, use a program that reads audio CDs, such as the
audio/xmcd package or port.

8.17.

How do I mount a multi-session
CD?

By default, mount(8) will attempt to mount the
last data track (session) of a CD. To
load an earlier session, use the
-s command line argument. Refer to
mount_cd9660(8) for specific examples.

8.18.

How do I let ordinary users mount CD-ROMs, DVDs,
USB drives, and other removable media?

As root set
the sysctl variable vfs.usermount to
1.

#sysctl vfs.usermount=1

To make this persist across reboots, add the line
vfs.usermount=1 to
/etc/sysctl.conf so that it is reset
at system boot time.

Users can only mount devices they have read
permissions to. To allow users to mount a device
permissions must be set in
/etc/devfs.conf.

All users can now mount devices they could read onto a
directory that they own:

%mkdir ~/my-mount-point%mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0 ~/my-mount-point

Unmounting the device is simple:

%umount ~/my-mount-point

Enabling vfs.usermount, however,
has negative security implications. A better way to
access MS-DOSÂ® formatted media is to use the
emulators/mtools package in the Ports
Collection.

Note:

The device name used in the previous examples must
be changed according to the configuration.

8.19.

The du and df
commands show different amounts of disk space available.
What is going on?

This is due to how these commands actually work.
du goes through the directory tree,
measures how large each file is, and presents the totals.
df just asks the file system how much
space it has left. They seem to be the same thing, but a
file without a directory entry will affect
df but not
du.

When a program is using a file, and the file is
deleted, the file is not really removed from the file
system until the program stops using it. The file is
immediately deleted from the directory listing, however.
As an example, consider a file that is large enough that
its presence affects the output of
du and df. If this
file is deleted while using more on it,
more does not immediately choke and
complain that it cannot view the file. The entry is
removed from the directory so no other program or user can
access it. However, du shows that it
is gone as it has walked the directory tree and the
file is not listed. df shows that it
is still there, as the file system knows that
more is still using that space. Once
the more session ends,
du and df will
agree.

This situation is common on web servers. Many people
set up a FreeBSD web server and forget to rotate the log
files. The access log fills up /var.
The new administrator deletes the file, but the system
still complains that the partition is full. Stopping and
restarting the web server program would free the file,
allowing the system to release the disk space. To prevent
this from happening, set up newsyslog(8).

Note that Soft Updates can delay the freeing of disk
space and it can take up to 30 seconds for the
change to be visible.

Also note that FreeBSD will (by default) reserve 8% of the
disk space.

8.22.

How is it possible for a partition to be more than
100% full?

A portion of each UFS partition (8%, by default) is
reserved for use by the operating system and the
root user.
df(1) does not count that space when calculating the
Capacity column, so it can exceed 100%.
Notice that the Blocks
column is always greater than the sum of the
Used and Avail
columns, usually by a factor of 8%.

Why does FreeBSD pause for a long time at boot when the
system has large amounts of ram?

FreeBSD does a short memory test early in the boot
process. This test usually only takes several seconds,
however if the system has many 10s or 100s of gigabytes
of memory it can take up to a few minutes. This test can
be disabled by setting hw.memtest.tests
to 0 in
/boot/loader.conf.

A minimum of 4GB of RAM is required for comfortable
usage, but individual workloads can vary widely.

9.2.

What is the ZIL and when does it get used?

The ZIL ((ZFS
intent log) is a write log used to implement posix write
commitment semantics across crashes. Normally writes
are bundled up into transaction groups and written to
disk when filled (“Transaction Group
Commit”). However syscalls like fsync(2)
require a commitment that the data is written to stable
storage before returning. The ZIL is needed for writes
that have been acknowledged as written but which are not
yet on disk as part of a transaction. The transaction
groups are timestamped. In the event of a crash the
last valid timestamp is found and missing data is merged
in from the ZIL.

9.3.

Do I need a SSD for ZIL?

By default, ZFS stores the ZIL in the pool with all
the data. If an application has a heavy write load,
storing the ZIL in a separate device that has very fast
synchronous, sequential write performance can improve
overall system. For other workloads, a SSD is unlikely
to make much of an improvement.

9.4.

What is the L2ARC?

The L2ARC is a read cache stored
on a fast device such as an SSD.
This cache is not persistent across reboots. Note that
RAM is used as the first layer of cache and the L2ARC is
only needed if there is insufficient RAM.

L2ARC needs space in the ARC to index it. So,
perversely, a working set that fits perfectly in the
ARC will not fit perfectly any more if a L2ARC is used
because part of the ARC is holding the L2ARC index,
pushing part of the working set into the L2ARC which is
slower than RAM.

9.5.

Is enabling deduplication advisable?

Generally speaking, no.

Deduplication takes up a significant amount of RAM
and may slow down read and write disk access times.
Unless one is storing data that is very heavily
duplicated, such as virtual machine images or user
backups, it is possible that deduplication will do more
harm than good. Another consideration is the inability
to revert deduplication status. If data is written when
deduplication is enabled, disabling dedup will not cause
those blocks which were deduplicated to be replicated
until they are next modified.

Deduplication can also lead to some unexpected
situations. In particular, deleting files may become
much slower.

9.6.

I cannot delete or create files on my ZFS pool.
How can I fix this?

This could happen because the pool is 100% full.
ZFS requires space on the disk to write transaction
metadata. To restore the pool to a usable state,
truncate the file to delete:

%truncate -s 0 unimportant-file

File truncation works because a new transaction is
not started, new spare blocks are created
instead.

Note:

On systems with additional ZFS dataset tuning,
such as deduplication, the space may not be
immediately available

9.7.

Does ZFS support TRIM for Solid State Drives?

ZFS TRIM support was added to FreeBSDÂ 10-CURRENT
with revision r240868. ZFS TRIM
support was added to all FreeBSD-STABLE branches in
r252162 and
r251419, respectively.

ZFS TRIM is enabled by default, and can be turned
off by adding this line to
/etc/sysctl.conf:

vfs.zfs.trim_disable=1

Note:

ZFS TRIM may not work with all configurations,
such as a ZFS filesystem on a GELI-backed
device.

The primary configuration file is
/etc/defaults/rc.conf which is
described in rc.conf(5). System startup scripts
such as /etc/rc and
/etc/rc.d, which are described in
rc(8), include this file. Do not edit this
file! Instead, to edit an entry in
/etc/defaults/rc.conf, copy the line
into /etc/rc.conf and change it
there.

To start up local services, place shell scripts in the
/usr/local/etc/rc.d directory. These
shell scripts should be set executable, the default file
mode is 555.

10.2.

How do I add a user easily?

Use the adduser(8) command, or the pw(8)
command for more complicated situations.

To remove the user, use the rmuser(8) command or,
if necessary, pw(8).

10.3.

Why do I keep getting messages like root:
not found after editing
/etc/crontab?

This is normally caused by editing the system crontab.
This is not the correct way to do things as the system
crontab has a different format to the per-user crontabs.
The system
crontab has an extra field, specifying which user to run
the command as. cron(8) assumes this user is the
first word of the command to execute. Since no such
command exists, this error message is displayed.

To delete the extra, incorrect crontab:

#crontab -r

10.4.

Why do I get the error, you are not in the
correct group to su root when I try to
su to root?

This is a security feature. In order to
su to
root, or any
other account with superuser privileges, the user account
must be a member of the
wheel group.
If this feature were not there, anybody with an
account on a system who also found out root's password would be
able to gain superuser level access to the system.

To allow someone to su to
root, put
them in the wheel group using
pw:

#pw groupmod wheel -m lisa

The above example will add user lisa to the group
wheel.

10.5.

I made a mistake in rc.conf, or
another startup file, and now I cannot edit it because the
file system is read-only. What should I do?

Restart the system using boot
-s at the loader prompt to enter single-user
mode. When prompted for a shell pathname, press
Enter and run mount
-urw / to re-mount the root file system in
read/write mode. You may also need to run mount
-a -t ufs to mount the file system where your
favorite editor is defined. If that editor is on
a network file system, either configure
the network manually before mounting the network file
systems, or use an editor which resides on a local file
system, such as ed(1).

In order to use a full screen editor such as
vi(1) or emacs(1), run
export TERM=xterm on FreeBSD 9.0+, or
export TERM=cons25 on FreeBSD 8.X so that
these editors can load the correct data from the
termcap(5) database.

After performing these steps, edit
/etc/rc.conf to
fix the syntax error. The error message displayed
immediately after the kernel boot messages should indicate
the number of the line in the file which is at
fault.

Put the quota file on the file system that the
quotas are to be enforced on:

File System

Quota file

/usr

/usr/admin/quotas

/home

/home/admin/quotas

…

…

10.9.

Does FreeBSD support System V IPC primitives?

Yes, FreeBSD supports System V-style IPC, including
shared memory, messages and semaphores, in the
GENERIC kernel. With a custom
kernel, support may be loaded with the
sysvshm.ko,
sysvsem.ko and
sysvmsg.ko kernel modules, or
enabled in the custom kernel by adding the following lines
to the kernel configuration file:

The Sendmail
server is the default mail-server software for FreeBSD, but
it can be replaced with another
MTA installed from the Ports Collection. Available ports
include mail/exim,
mail/postfix, and
mail/qmail. Search the mailing lists
for discussions regarding the advantages and disadvantages
of the available MTAs.

10.11.

I have forgotten the root password! What do I
do?

Do not panic! Restart the system, type
boot -s at the
Boot: prompt to enter single-user mode.
At the question about the shell to use, hit
Enter which will display a
# prompt. Enter mount
-urw / to remount the root file system
read/write, then run mount -a to
remount all the file systems. Run passwd
root to change the root password then run
exit(1) to continue booting.

Note:

If you are still prompted to give the root password when
entering the single-user mode, it means that the console
has been marked as insecure in
/etc/ttys. In this case, it will
be required to boot from a FreeBSD installation disk,
choose the Live CD or
Shell at the beginning of the
install process and issue the commands mentioned above.
Mount the specific partition in this
case and then chroot to it. For example, replace
mount -urw / with
mount /dev/ada0p1 /mnt; chroot /mnt
for a system on
ada0p1.

Note:

If the root partition cannot be mounted from
single-user mode, it is possible that the partitions are
encrypted and it is impossible to mount them without the
access keys. For more information see the section
about encrypted disks in the FreeBSD Handbook.

10.12.

How do I keep Control+Alt+Delete
from rebooting the system?

When using syscons(4), the default console
driver, build and install a new kernel with this line in
the configuration file:

options SC_DISABLE_REBOOT

This can also be done by setting the following
sysctl(8) which does not require a reboot or kernel
recompile:

#sysctl hw.syscons.kbd_reboot=0

Note:

The above two methods are exclusive: The
sysctl(8) does not exist if the kernel is compiled
with SC_DISABLE_REBOOT.

dos-text-file is the file
containing DOS text while
unix-file will contain the
converted output. This can be quite a bit faster than
using perl.

Yet another way to reformat DOS text files is to use
the converters/dosunix port from the
Ports Collection. Consult its documentation about the
details.

10.14.

How do I re-read /etc/rc.conf and
re-start /etc/rc without a
reboot?

Go into single-user mode and then back to multi-user
mode:

#shutdown now#return#exit

10.15.

I tried to update my system to the latest
-STABLE, but got
-BETAx,
-RC or
-PRERELEASE! What is going
on?

Short answer: it is just a name.
RC stands for “Release
Candidate”. It signifies that a release is
imminent. In FreeBSD, -PRERELEASE is
typically synonymous with the code freeze before a
release. (For some releases, the
-BETA label was used in the same way
as -PRERELEASE.)

Long answer: FreeBSD derives its releases from one of two
places. Major, dot-zero, releases, such as 9.0-RELEASE
are branched from the head of the development stream,
commonly referred to as -CURRENT. Minor releases, such
as 6.3-RELEASE or 5.2-RELEASE, have been snapshots of the
active -STABLE branch.
Starting with 4.3-RELEASE, each release also now has its
own branch which can be tracked by people requiring an
extremely conservative rate of development (typically only
security advisories).

When a release is about to be made, the branch from
which it will be derived from has to undergo a certain
process. Part of this process is a code freeze. When a
code freeze is initiated, the name of the branch is
changed to reflect that it is about to become a release.
For example, if the branch used to be called 6.2-STABLE,
its name will be changed to 6.3-PRERELEASE to signify the
code freeze and signify that extra pre-release testing
should be happening. Bug fixes can still be committed to
be part of the release. When the source code is in shape
for the release the name will be changed to 6.3-RC to
signify that a release is about to be made from it. Once
in the RC stage, only the most critical bugs found can be
fixed. Once the release (6.3-RELEASE in this example) and
release branch have been made, the branch will be renamed
to 6.3-STABLE.

For more information on version numbers and the
various Subversion branches, refer to the Release
Engineering article.

10.16.

I tried to install a new kernel, and the
chflags(1) failed. How do I get around this?

Short answer: the security level is
greater than 0. Reboot directly to single-user mode to
install the kernel.

Long answer: FreeBSD disallows changing system flags at
security levels greater than 0. To check the current
security level:

#sysctl kern.securelevel

The security level cannot be lowered in multi-user
mode, so boot to single-user mode to install the kernel,
or change the security level in
/etc/rc.conf then reboot. See the
init(8) manual page for details on
securelevel, and see
/etc/defaults/rc.conf and the
rc.conf(5) manual page for more information on
rc.conf.

10.17.

I cannot change the time on my system by more than one
second! How do I get around this?

Short answer: the system is at a security level
greater than 1. Reboot directly to single-user mode to
change the date.

Long answer: FreeBSD disallows changing the time by more
that one second at security levels greater than 1. To
check the security level:

#sysctl kern.securelevel

The security level cannot be lowered in multi-user
mode. Either boot to single-user mode to change the date
or change the security level in
/etc/rc.conf and reboot. See the
init(8) manual page for details on
securelevel, and see
/etc/defaults/rc.conf and the
rc.conf(5) manual page for more information on
rc.conf.

10.18.

Why is rpc.statd using 256Â MB
of memory?

No, there is no memory leak, and it is not using
256Â MB of memory. For convenience,
rpc.statd maps an obscene amount of
memory into its address space. There is nothing terribly
wrong with this from a technical standpoint; it just
throws off things like top(1) and ps(1).

rpc.statd(8) maps its status file (resident on
/var) into its address space; to save
worrying about remapping it later when it needs to grow,
it maps it with a generous size. This is very evident
from the source code, where one can see that the length
argument to mmap(2) is 0x10000000,
or one sixteenth of the address space on an IA32, or
exactly 256Â MB.

vnlru flushes and frees vnodes when
the system hits the kern.maxvnodes
limit. This kernel thread sits mostly idle, and only
activates when there is a huge amount of RAM and users are
accessing tens of thousands of tiny files.

10.21.

What do the various memory states displayed by
top mean?

Active: pages recently
statistically used.

Inactive: pages recently
statistically unused.

Cache: (most often) pages that
have percolated from inactive to a status where they
maintain their data, but can often be immediately
reused (either with their old association, or reused
with a new association). There can be certain
immediate transitions from active
to cache state if the page is known
to be clean (unmodified), but that transition is a
matter of policy, depending upon the algorithm choice
of the VM system maintainer.

Free: pages without data
content, and can be immediately used in certain
circumstances where cache pages might be ineligible.
Free pages can be reused at interrupt or process
state.

Wired: pages that are fixed
into memory, usually for kernel purposes, but also
sometimes for special use in processes.

Pages are most often written to disk (sort of a VM
sync) when they are in the inactive state, but active
pages can also be synced. This depends upon the CPU
tracking of the modified bit being available, and in
certain situations there can be an advantage for a block
of VM pages to be synced, whether they are active or
inactive. In most common cases, it is best to think of
the inactive queue to be a queue of relatively unused
pages that might or might not be in the process of being
written to disk. Cached pages are already synced, not
mapped, but available for immediate process use with their
old association or with a new association. Free pages are
available at interrupt level, but cached or free pages can
be used at process state for reuse. Cache pages are not
adequately locked to be available at interrupt
level.

There are some other flags (e.g., busy flag or busy
count) that might modify some of the described
rules.

10.22.

How much free memory is available?

There are a couple of kinds of “free
memory”. One kind is the amount of memory
immediately available without paging anything else out.
That is approximately the size of cache queue + size of
free queue (with a derating factor, depending upon system
tuning). Another kind of “free memory” is
the total amount of VM space. That can
be complex, but is dependent upon the amount of swap space
and memory. Other kinds of “free memory”
descriptions are also possible, but it is relatively
useless to define these, but rather it is important to
make sure that the paging rate is kept low, and to avoid
running out of swap space.

10.23.

What is /var/empty?

/var/empty is a directory that
the sshd(8) program uses when performing privilege
separation. The /var/empty
directory is empty, owned by root and has the
schg flag set. This directory should
not be deleted.

10.24.

I just changed
/etc/newsyslog.conf. How can I check
if it does what I expect?

The X Window System (commonly X11)
is the most widely available windowing system capable of
running on UNIXÂ® or UNIXÂ®Â like systems, including
FreeBSD. The X.Org
Foundation administers the X
protocol standards, with the current reference
implementation, version 11 release 7.7, so
references are often shortened to
X11.

Many implementations are available for different
architectures and operating systems. An implementation of
the server-side code is properly known as an X
server.

11.2.

I want to run Xorg, how do I go about it?

To install Xorg do one of the following:

Use the x11/xorg
meta-port, which builds and installs every Xorg
component.

Use x11/xorg-minimal, which builds
and installs only the necessary Xorg components.

Install Xorg from FreeBSD packages:

# pkg install xorg

After the installation of Xorg, follow the
instructions from the X11
Configuration section of the FreeBSD
Handbook.

11.3.

I tried to run X, but I get a
No devices detected. error when I
type startx. What do I do now?

The system is probably running at a raised
securelevel. It is not possible to
start X at a raised securelevel because
X requires write access to io(4). For more
information, see at the init(8) manual page.

There are two solutions to the problem: set the
securelevel back down to zero or run
xdm(1) (or an alternative display manager) at boot
time before the securelevel is
raised.

When using syscons(4), the default console
driver, FreeBSD can be configured to support a mouse pointer
on each virtual screen. To avoid conflicting with X,
syscons(4) supports a virtual device called
/dev/sysmouse. All mouse events
received from the real mouse device are written to the
sysmouse(4) device via moused(8). To use the
mouse on one or more virtual consoles,
and use X, see Q:Â 4.4.1 and set up
moused(8).

Starting with Xorg version 7.4, the
InputDevice sections in
xorg.conf are ignored in favor of
autodetected devices. To restore the old behavior, add
the following line to the ServerLayout
or ServerFlags section:

Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"

Some people prefer to use
/dev/mouse under X. To make this
work, /dev/mouse should be linked
to /dev/sysmouse (see
sysmouse(4)) by adding the following line to
/etc/devfs.conf (see
devfs.conf(5)):

link sysmouse mouse

This link can be created by restarting devfs(5)
with the following command (as root):

#service devfs restart

11.5.

My mouse has a fancy wheel. Can I use it in X?

Yes, if X is configured for a 5 button mouse. To
do this, add the lines Buttons 5
and ZAxisMapping 4 5 to the
“InputDevice” section of
/etc/X11/xorg.conf, as seen in this
example:

For security reasons, the default setting is to not
allow a machine to remotely open a window.

To enable this feature, start
X with the optional
-listen_tcp argument:

%startx -listen_tcp

11.8.

What is a virtual console and how do I make
more?

Virtual consoles provide
several simultaneous sessions on the same machine without
doing anything complicated like setting up a network or
running X.

When the system starts, it will display a login prompt
on the monitor after displaying all the boot messages.
Type in your login name and password to
start working on the first virtual
console.

To start another
session, perhaps to look at documentation for a program
or to read mail while waiting for an
FTP transfer to finish,
hold down Alt and press
F2. This will display the login prompt
for the second virtual
console. To go back to the
original session, press Alt+F1.

The default FreeBSD installation has eight virtual
consoles enabled. Alt+F1,
Alt+F2,
Alt+F3,
and so on will switch between these virtual
consoles.

To enable more of virtual consoles, edit
/etc/ttys (see ttys(5)) and add
entries for ttyv8 to
ttyvc, after the comment on
“Virtual terminals”:

The more virtual
terminals, the more resources that are used. This can be
problematic on systems with 8Â MB RAM or less.
Consider changing secure to
insecure.

Note:

Versions of FreeBSD prior to 9.0 used the “
cons25” terminal type, and not “
xterm”. Use the format of existing entries in
when adding entries to
/etc/ttys.

Important:

In order to run an X server, at least one virtual
terminal must be left to off for it
to use. This means that only eleven of the Alt-function
keys can be used as virtual consoles so that one is left
for the X server.

For example, to run X and eleven virtual consoles, the
setting for virtual terminal 12 should be:

ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm off secure

The easiest way to activate the
virtual consoles is to reboot.

11.9.

How do I access the virtual consoles from X?

Use Ctrl+Alt+Fn
to switch back to a virtual console. Press Ctrl+Alt+F1
to return to the first virtual console.

Once at a text console, use
Alt+Fn
to move between them.

To return to the X session, switch to the
virtual console running X. If X was started from the
command line using startx,
the X session will attach to the next unused virtual
console, not the text console from which it was invoked.
For eight active virtual terminals, X will
run on the ninth, so use Alt+F9.

11.10.

How do I start XDM on
boot?

There are two schools of thought on how to start
xdm(1). One school starts xdm
from /etc/ttys (see ttys(5))
using the supplied example, while the other runs
xdm from
rc.local (see rc(8)) or from an
X script in
/usr/local/etc/rc.d. Both are
equally valid, and one may work in situations where the
other does not. In both cases the result is the same: X
will pop up a graphical login prompt.

The ttys(5) method has the advantage of
documenting which vty X will start on and passing the
responsibility of restarting the X server on logout to
init(8). The rc(8) method makes it easy to
killxdm if there is
a problem starting the X server.

If loaded from rc(8), xdm
should be started without any arguments.
xdm must start
aftergetty(8) runs, or else
getty and xdm will
conflict, locking out the console. The best way around
this is to have the script sleep 10 seconds or so then
launch xdm.

When starting xdm from
/etc/ttys, there still is a chance of
conflict between xdm and getty(8).
One way to avoid this is to add the vt
number in
/usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers:

:0 local /usr/local/bin/X vt4

The above example will direct the X server to run in
/dev/ttyv3. Note the number is
offset by one. The X server counts the vty from one,
whereas the FreeBSD kernel numbers the vty from zero.

11.11.

Why do I get Couldn't open
console when I run
xconsole?

When X is started with
startx, the permissions on
/dev/console will
not get changed, resulting in things
like xterm -C and
xconsole not working.

This is because of the way console permissions are set
by default. On a multi-user system, one does not
necessarily want just any user to be able to write on the
system console. For users who are logging directly onto a
machine with a VTY, the fbtab(5) file exists to solve
such problems.

In a nutshell, make sure an uncommented line of the
form is in /etc/fbtab (see
fbtab(5)):

/dev/ttyv0 0600 /dev/console

It will ensure that whomever logs in on
/dev/ttyv0 will own the
console.

11.12.

Why does my PS/2 mouse misbehave under X?

The mouse and the mouse driver may have become out of
synchronization. In rare cases, the driver may also
erroneously report synchronization errors:

psmintr: out of sync (xxxx != yyyy)

If this happens, disable the synchronization check
code by setting the driver flags for the PS/2 mouse driver
to 0x100. This can be easiest achieved
by adding hint.psm.0.flags="0x100" to
/boot/loader.conf and
rebooting.

11.13.

How do I reverse the mouse buttons?

Type
xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1". Add this
command to ~/.xinitrc or
~/.xsession to make it happen
automatically.

Yes. Use xmodmap(1) to
define which functions the keys should perform.

Assuming all Windows keyboards are
standard, the keycodes for these three keys are the
following:

115 —
Windows key, between the left-hand
Ctrl and Alt
keys

116 —
Windows key, to the right of
AltGr

117 —
Menu, to the left of the right-hand
Ctrl

To have the left Windows key print a
comma, try this.

#xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = comma"

To have the Windows key-mappings
enabled automatically every time X is started, either put
the xmodmap commands in
~/.xinitrc or, preferably, create
a ~/.xmodmaprc and include the
xmodmap options, one per line, then add
the following line to
~/.xinitrc:

xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmaprc

For example, to map the 3 keys to be
F13, F14, and
F15, respectively. This would make it
easy to map them to useful functions within applications
or the window manager.

To do this, put the following in
~/.xmodmaprc.

keycode 115 = F13
keycode 116 = F14
keycode 117 = F15

For the x11-wm/fvwm2 desktop
manager, one could map the keys so that
F13 iconifies or de-iconifies the
window the cursor is in, F14 brings the
window the cursor is in to the front or, if it is already
at the front, pushes it to the back, and
F15 pops up the main Workplace
menu even if the cursor is not on the
desktop, which is useful when no part of
the desktop is visible.

The following entries in
~/.fvwmrc implement the
aforementioned setup:

“Diskless booting” means that the FreeBSD
box is booted over a network, and reads the necessary
files from a server instead of its hard disk. For full
details, see the
Handbook entry on diskless booting.

Typically, people who ask this question have two PCs
at home, one with FreeBSD and one with some version of
WindowsÂ® the idea is to use the FreeBSD box to connect to
the Internet and then be able to access the Internet from
the WindowsÂ® box through the FreeBSD box. This is really
just a special case of the previous question and works
perfectly well.

Why is my ipfw“fwd”
rule to redirect a service to another machine not
working?

Possibly because network address translation (NAT) is
needed instead of just forwarding packets. A
“fwd” rule only forwards packets, it does not
actually change the data inside the packet. Consider this
rule:

01000 fwd 10.0.0.1 from any to foo 21

When a packet with a destination address of
foo arrives at the machine with
this rule, the packet is forwarded to
10.0.0.1, but it still has the
destination address of foo.
The destination address of the packet is
not changed to
10.0.0.1. Most machines would
probably drop a packet that they receive with a
destination address that is not their own. Therefore,
using a “fwd” rule does not often work the
way the user expects. This behavior is a feature and not
a bug.

where ftp.example.com and
ftp are the host and port to
redirect to, respectively.

12.14.

Where can I get a bandwidth management tool?

There are three bandwidth management tools available
for FreeBSD. dummynet(4) is integrated into FreeBSD as
part of ipfw(4). ALTQ
has been integrated into FreeBSD as part of pf(4).
Bandwidth Manager from Emerging
Technologies is a commercial product.

12.15.

Why do I get /dev/bpf0: device not
configured?

The running application requires the Berkeley
Packet Filter (bpf(4)), but it was removed from a
custom kernel. Add this to the kernel config file and
build a new kernel:

device bpf # Berkeley Packet Filter

12.16.

How do I mount a disk from a WindowsÂ® machine that is
on my network, like smbmount in LinuxÂ®?

Use the SMBFS toolset. It
includes a set of kernel modifications and a set of
userland programs. The programs and information are
available as mount_smbfs(8) in the base
system.

This kernel message indicates that some activity is
provoking it to send a large amount of ICMP or TCP reset
(RST) responses. ICMP responses are
often generated as a result of attempted connections to
unused UDP ports. TCP resets are generated as a result of
attempted connections to unopened TCP ports. Among
others, these are the kinds of activities which may cause
these messages:

Brute-force denial of service (DoS) attacks (as
opposed to single-packet attacks which exploit a
specific vulnerability).

Port scans which attempt to connect to a large
number of ports (as opposed to only trying a few
well-known ports).

The first number in the message indicates how many
packets the kernel would have sent if the limit was not in
place, and the second indicates the limit. This limit
is controlled using
net.inet.icmp.icmplim. This example
sets the limit to 300
packets per second:

#sysctl net.inet.icmp.icmplim=300

To disable these messages
without disabling response
limiting, use
net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output
to disable the output:

#sysctl net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output=0

Finally, to disable response limiting completely,
set net.inet.icmp.icmplim to
0. Disabling response limiting is
discouraged for the reasons listed above.

12.18.

What are these arp: unknown hardware
address format error messages?

This means that some device on the local Ethernet is
using a MAC address in a format that FreeBSD does not
recognize. This is probably caused by someone
experimenting with an Ethernet card somewhere else on the
network. This is most commonly seen on cable modem
networks. It is harmless, and should not affect the
performance of the FreeBSD system.

12.19.

Why do I keep seeing messages like:
192.168.0.10 is on
fxp1 but got reply from 00:15:17:67:cf:82 on
rl0, and how do I disable it?

Because a packet is coming from outside the network
unexpectedly. To disable them, set
net.link.ether.inet.log_arp_wrong_iface
to 0.

A process which is placed inside a set of virtual
walls that are designed to prevent someone who breaks
into the process from being able to break into the
wider system.

The process is be able to run inside the walls.
Since nothing the process does in regards to executing
code is supposed to be able to breech the walls, a
detailed audit of its code is not needed in order to
be able to say certain things about its
security.

The walls might be a user ID, for example.
This is the definition used in the security(7)
and named(8) man pages.

Take the ntalk service, for
example (see inetd(8)). This service used to run
as userÂ ID root. Now it runs as
userÂ ID tty. The tty user is a sandbox
designed to make it more difficult for someone who has
successfully hacked into the system via
ntalk from being able to hack
beyond that userÂ ID.

A process which is placed inside a simulation of
the machine. It means that someone who is able to
break into the process may believe that he can break
into the wider machine but is, in fact, only breaking
into a simulation of that machine and not modifying
any real data.

The most common way to accomplish this is to build
a simulated environment in a subdirectory and then run
the processes in that directory chrooted so that
/ for that process is this
directory, not the real / of the
system).

Another common use is to mount an underlying file
system read-only and then create a file system layer
on top of it that gives a process a seemingly
writeable view into that file system. The process may
believe it is able to write to those files, but only
the process sees the effects — other processes
in the system do not, necessarily.

An attempt is made to make this sort of sandbox so
transparent that the user (or hacker) does not realize
that he is sitting in it.

UNIXÂ® implements two core sandboxes. One is at the
process level, and one is at the userid level.

Every UNIXÂ® process is completely firewalled off from
every other UNIXÂ® process. One process cannot modify the
address space of another.

A UNIXÂ® process is owned by a particular userid. If
the userÂ ID is not the root user, it serves to
firewall the process off from processes owned by other
users. The userÂ ID is also used to firewall off
on-disk data.

13.2.

What is securelevel?

securelevel is a security
mechanism implemented in the kernel. When the securelevel
is positive, the kernel restricts certain tasks; not even
the superuser (root) is allowed to do
them. The securelevel mechanism limits the ability
to:

Unset certain file flags, such as
schg (the system immutable
flag).

Write to kernel memory via
/dev/mem and
/dev/kmem.

Load kernel modules.

Alter firewall rules.

To check the status of the securelevel on a running
system:

#sysctl -n kern.securelevel

The output contains the current value of the
securelevel. If it is greater than 0, at
least some of the securelevel's protections are
enabled.

The securelevel of a running system cannot be lowered
as this would defeat its purpose. If a task requires that
the securelevel be non-positive, change the
kern_securelevel and
kern_securelevel_enable variables in
/etc/rc.conf and reboot.

For more information on securelevel and the specific
things all the levels do, consult init(8).

Warning:

Securelevel is not a silver bullet; it has many
known deficiencies. More often than not, it provides a
false sense of security.

One of its biggest problems is that in order for it
to be at all effective, all files used in the boot
process up until the securelevel is set must be
protected. If an attacker can get the system to execute
their code prior to the securelevel being set (which
happens quite late in the boot process since some things
the system must do at start-up cannot be done at an
elevated securelevel), its protections are invalidated.
While this task of protecting all files used in the boot
process is not technically impossible, if it is
achieved, system maintenance will become a nightmare
since one would have to take the system down, at least
to single-user mode, to modify a configuration
file.

This point and others are often discussed on the
mailing lists, particularly the FreeBSD security mailing list.
Search the archives here
for an extensive discussion. A more fine-grained
mechanism is preferred.

13.3.

BIND (named) is listening on some
high-numbered ports. What is going on?

BIND uses a random high-numbered port for outgoing
queries. Recent versions of it choose a new, random UDP
port for each query. This may cause problems for some
network configurations, especially if a firewall blocks
incoming UDP packets on particular ports. To
get past that firewall, try the
avoid-v4-udp-ports and
avoid-v6-udp-ports options to avoid
selecting random port numbers within a blocked
range.

Warning:

If a port number (like 53) is specified via the
query-source or
query-source-v6 options in
/etc/namedb/named.conf, randomized
port selection will not be used. It is strongly
recommended that these options not be used to specify
fixed port numbers.

Congratulations, by the way. It is good practice to
read sockstat(1) output and notice odd
things!

13.4.

The Sendmail daemon is
listening on port 587 as well as the standard port 25!
What is going on?

Recent versions of Sendmail
support a mail submission feature that runs over port 587.
This is not yet widely supported, but is growing in
popularity.

13.5.

What is this UID 0 toor account? Have I been
compromised?

Do not worry. toor is an
“alternative” superuser account, where toor
is root spelled backwards. It is intended to be used with
a non-standard shell so the default shell for root does not need to
change. This is important as shells which are not part of
the base distribution, but are instead installed from
ports or packages, are installed in
/usr/local/bin which, by default,
resides on a different file system. If root's shell is located in
/usr/local/bin and the
file system
containing /usr/local/bin) is not
mounted, root will not be able to
log in to fix a problem and will have to reboot into
single-user mode in order to enter the path to a
shell.

Some people use toor for day-to-day
root tasks with
a non-standard shell, leaving root, with a standard
shell, for single-user mode or emergencies. By default, a
user cannot log in using toor as it does not have a
password, so log in as root and set a password
for toor before
using it to login.

This command may be typed at the ppp(8) command
prompt or it may be entered at the start of the
default section
in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf. Make sure that
/etc/syslog.conf contains the lines
below and the file /var/log/ppp.log
exists:

!ppp
*.* /var/log/ppp.log

A lot about what is going can be learned from the log
file. Do not worry if it does not all make sense as
it may make sense to someone else.

This is usually because the hostname will not
resolve. The best way to fix this is to make sure that
/etc/hosts is read first by the
by ensuring that the hosts line is
listed first in /etc/host.conf.
Then, put an entry in /etc/hosts for
the local machine. If there is no local network, change
the localhost line:

127.0.0.1 foo.example.com foo localhost

Otherwise, add another entry for the host.
Consult the relevant manual pages for more details.

When finished, verify that this command is successful:
ping -c1 `hostname`.

This error is usually because the following section
is missing in
/etc/ppp/ppp.linkup:

MYADDR:
delete ALL
add 0 0 HISADDR

This is only necessary for a dynamic IP address or
when the address of the default gateway is unknown. When
using interactive mode, the following can be typed in
after entering packet mode. Packet mode
is indicated by the capitalized PPP in
the prompt:

The default PPP timeout is 3 minutes. This can be
adjusted with the following line:

set timeout NNN

where NNN is the number of
seconds of inactivity before the connection is closed. If
NNN is zero, the connection is
never closed due to a timeout. It is possible to put this
command in ppp.conf, or to type it at
the prompt in interactive mode. It is also possible to
adjust it on the fly while the line is active by
connecting to ppp's server
socket using telnet(1) or pppctl(8). Refer to
the ppp(8) man page for further details.

14.6.

Why does my connection drop under heavy load?

If Link Quality Reporting (LQR) is
configured, it is possible that too many
LQR packets are lost between the FreeBSD
system and the peer. ppp(8) deduces that the line
must therefore be bad, and disconnects.
LQR is disabled by default and can be
enabled with the following line:

enable lqr

14.7.

Why does my connection drop after a random amount of
time?

Sometimes, on a noisy phone line or even on a line
with call waiting enabled, the modem may hang up because
it incorrectly thinks that it lost carrier.

There is a setting on most modems for determining how
tolerant it should be to temporary losses of carrier.
Refer to the modem manual for details.

14.8.

Why does my connection hang after a random amount of
time?

Many people experience hung connections with no
apparent explanation. The first thing to establish is
which side of the link is hung.

When using an external modem, try
using ping(8) to see if the TD
light is flashing when data is transmitted. If it flashes
but the RD light does not, the
problem is with the remote end. If TD
does not flash, the problem is local. With an internal
modem, use the set
server command in
ppp.conf. When the hang occurs,
connect to ppp(8) using pppctl(8). If the
network connection suddenly revives due to the activity on
the diagnostic socket, or if it will not
connect but the set socket
command succeeded at startup time, the problem is local.
If it can connect but things are still hung, enable local
logging with set log local async
and use ping(8) from another window or terminal to
make use of the link. The async logging will show the
data being transmitted and received on the link. If data
is going out and not coming back, the problem is
remote.

Having established whether the problem is local or
remote, there are now two possibilities:

There is very little that can be done about this.
Many ISPs will refuse to help users not running a
MicrosoftÂ® OS. Add enable lqr to
/etc/ppp/ppp.conf, allowing
ppp(8) to detect the remote failure and hang up.
This detection is relatively slow and therefore not that
useful.

First, try disabling all local compression by adding
the following to the configuration:

Then reconnect to ensure that this makes no
difference. If things improve or if the problem is solved
completely, determine which setting makes the difference
through trial and error. This is good information for
the ISP, although it may make
it apparent that it is not a MicrosoftÂ® system.

Before contacting the ISP, enable async logging
locally and wait until the connection hangs again. This
may use up quite a bit of disk space. The last data read
from the port may be of interest. It is usually ASCII
data, and may even describe the problem (Memory
fault, Core
dumped).

If the ISP is helpful, they should be able to enable
logging on their end, then when the next link drop occurs,
they may be able to tell why their side is having a
problem.

Then, restart ppp
and wait until it hangs again. When the debug build of
ppp hangs, start
gdb on the stuck process by
typing:

#gdb ppp `pgrep ppp`

At the gdb prompt,
use the bt or where
commands to get a stack trace. Save the output of the
gdb session, and
“detach” from the running process by typing
quit.

14.11.

I keep seeing errors about magic being the same. What
does it mean?

Occasionally, just after connecting, there may be
messages in the log that say Magic is
same. Sometimes, these messages are
harmless, and sometimes one side or the other exits. Most
PPP implementations cannot survive this problem, and even
if the link seems to come up, there will be repeated
configure requests and configure acknowledgments in the
log file until ppp(8) eventually gives up and closes
the connection.

This normally happens on server machines with slow
disks that are spawning a getty(8) on the port, and
executing ppp(8) from a login script or program after
login. There were reports of it happening consistently
when using slirp. The reason is that in the time taken
between getty(8) exiting and ppp(8) starting,
the client-side ppp(8) starts sending Line Control
Protocol (LCP) packets. Because ECHO is still switched on
for the port on the server, the client ppp(8) sees
these packets “reflect” back.

One part of the LCP negotiation is to establish a
magic number for each side of the link so that
“reflections” can be detected. The protocol
says that when the peer tries to negotiate the same magic
number, a NAK should be sent and a new magic number should
be chosen. During the period that the server port has
ECHO turned on, the client ppp(8) sends LCP packets,
sees the same magic in the reflected packet and NAKs it.
It also sees the NAK reflect (which also means ppp(8)
must change its magic). This produces a potentially
enormous number of magic number changes, all of which are
happily piling into the server's tty buffer. As soon as
ppp(8) starts on the server, it is flooded with magic
number changes and almost immediately decides it has tried
enough to negotiate LCP and gives up. Meanwhile, the
client, who no longer sees the reflections, becomes happy
just in time to see a hangup from the server.

This can be avoided by allowing the peer to start
negotiating with the following line in
ppp.conf:

set openmode passive

This tells ppp(8) to wait for the server to
initiate LCP negotiations. Some servers however may never
initiate negotiations. In this case, try
something like:

set openmode active 3

This tells ppp(8) to be passive for 3 seconds,
and then to start sending LCP requests. If the peer
starts sending requests during this period, ppp(8)
will immediately respond rather than waiting for the full
3 second period.

14.12.

LCP negotiations continue until the connection is
closed. What is wrong?

There is currently an implementation mis-feature in
ppp(8) where it does not associate LCP, CCP &
IPCP responses with their original requests. As a result,
if one PPP implementation is more than 6 seconds slower
than the other side, the other side will send two
additional LCP configuration requests. This is
fatal.

Consider two implementations,
A and B.
A starts sending LCP requests
immediately after connecting and
B takes 7 seconds to start. When
B starts,
A has sent 3 LCP REQs. We are
assuming the line has ECHO switched off, otherwise we
would see magic number problems as described in the
previous section. B sends a REQ,
then an ACK to the first of A's
REQs. This results in A entering
the OPENED state and sending and ACK
(the first) back to B. In the
meantime, B sends back two more
ACKs in response to the two additional REQs sent by
A before
B started up.
B then receives the first ACK
from A and enters the
OPENED state.
A receives the second ACK from
B and goes back to the
REQ-SENT state, sending another (forth)
REQ as per the RFC. It then receives the third ACK and
enters the OPENED state. In the
meantime, B receives the forth
REQ from A, resulting in it
reverting to the ACK-SENT state and
sending another (second) REQ and (forth) ACK as per the
RFC. A gets the REQ, goes into
REQ-SENT and sends another REQ. It
immediately receives the following ACK and enters
OPENED.

This goes on until one side figures out that they are
getting nowhere and gives up.

The best way to avoid this is to configure one side to
be passive — that is, make one
side wait for the other to start negotiating. This can be
done with the following command:

set openmode passive

Care should be taken with this option. This command
can also be used to limit the amount of time that
ppp(8) waits for the peer to begin
negotiations:

set stopped N

Alternatively, the following command (where
N is the number of seconds to
wait before starting negotiations) can be used:

When using shell or
!, ppp(8) executes a shell
or the passed arguments. The
ppp program will wait for the
command to complete before continuing. Any attempt to
use the PPP link while running the command will appear as
a frozen link. This is because ppp(8) is
waiting for the command to complete.

To execute commands like this, use
!bg instead. This will execute the
given command in the background, and ppp(8) can
continue to service the link.

There is no way for ppp(8) to automatically
determine that a direct connection has been dropped. This
is due to the lines that are used in a null-modem serial
cable. When using this sort of connection, LQR should
always be enabled with the following line:

If ppp(8) is dialing unexpectedly,
determine the cause, and set up dial filters to
prevent such dialing.

To determine the cause, use the following line:

set log +tcp/ip

This will log all traffic through the connection. The
next time the line comes up unexpectedly, the
reason will be logged with a convenient timestamp next to
it.

Next, disable dialing under these circumstances.
Usually, this sort of problem arises due to DNS lookups.
To prevent DNS lookups from establishing a connection
(this will not prevent ppp(8)
from passing the packets through an established
connection), use the following:

This is not always suitable, as it will effectively
break demand-dial capabilities. Most programs
will need a DNS lookup before doing any other network
related things.

In the DNS case, try to determine what is actually
trying to resolve a host name. A lot of the time,
Sendmail is the culprit. Make
sure to configure Sendmail not
to do any DNS lookups in its configuration file. See the
section on using
email with a dialup connection in the FreeBSD
Handbook for details. You may
also want to add the following line to
.mc:

define(`confDELIVERY_MODE', `d')dnl

This will make Sendmail
queue everything until the queue is run, usually,
every 30 minutes, or until a sendmail
-q is done, perhaps from
/etc/ppp/ppp.linkup.

This is because ppp(8) is trying to negotiate
Predictor1 compression, but the peer does not want to
negotiate any compression at all. The messages are
harmless, but can be silenced by disabling the
compression:

The ppp utility parses each
line in its configuration files so that it can interpret
strings such as set phone "123 456 789"
correctly and realize that the number is actually only
one argument. To specify a
" character, escape it
using a backslash (\).

When the chat interpreter parses each argument, it
re-interprets the argument to find any special escape
sequences such as \P or
\T. As a result
of this double-parsing, remember to use the
correct number of escapes.

To actually send a \
character, do something
like:

set dial "\"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK AT\\\\X OK"

It will result in the following sequence:

ATZ
OK
AT\X
OK

Or:

set phone 1234567
set dial "\"\" ATZ OK ATDT\\T"

It will result in the following sequence:

ATZ
OK
ATDT1234567

14.19.

What are FCS errors?

FCS stands for Frame Check Sequence. Each PPP packet
has a checksum attached to ensure that the data being
received is the data being sent. If the FCS of an
incoming packet is incorrect, the packet is dropped and
the HDLC FCS count is increased. The HDLC error values
can be displayed using the show hdlc
command.

If the link is bad or if the serial driver is dropping
packets, it will produce the occasional FCS error.
This is not usually worth worrying about although it does
slow down the compression protocols substantially.

If the link freezes as soon as it connects and
produces a large number of FCS errors, make sure the modem
is not using software flow control (XON/XOFF). If the
link must use software flow control, use
set accmap 0x000a0000 to
tell ppp(8) to escape the ^Q and
^S characters.

Another reason for too many FCS errors may be
that the remote end has stopped talking
PPP. In this case, enable
async logging to
determine if the incoming data is actually a login or
shell prompt. If it is a shell prompt at the remote
end, it is possible to terminate ppp(8) without
dropping the line by using close lcp
followed by term) to reconnect to
the shell on the remote machine.

If nothing in the log file indicates why the link
was terminated, ask the remote
administrator or ISP why the session was
terminated.

14.20.

None of this helps — I am desperate! What can I
do?

If all else fails, send the details of the error, the
configuration files, how ppp(8) is being started, the
relevant parts of the log file, and the
output of netstat -rn, before and after
connecting, to the FreeBSD general questions mailing list.

ChapterÂ 15.Â Serial Communications

This section answers common questions about serial
communications with FreeBSD. PPP is covered in the Networking section.

This example shows two serial ports. The first is on
IRQ4, port address
0x3f8, and has a 16550A-type UART chip.
The second uses the same kind of chip but is on
IRQ3 and is at port address
0x2f8. Internal modem cards are
treated just like serial ports, except that they
always have a modem attached to the
port.

The GENERIC kernel includes
support for two serial ports using the same IRQ and port
address settings in the above example. If these settings
are not right for the system, or if there are more modem
cards or serial ports than the kernel is
configured for, reconfigure using the instructions in
building a kernel
for more details.

15.4.

How do I access the serial ports on FreeBSD?

The third serial port, sio2,
or COM3,
is on /dev/cuad2 for dial-out
devices, and on /dev/ttyd2 for
dial-in devices. What is the difference between these two
classes of devices?

When
opening /dev/ttydX in blocking mode,
a process will wait for the corresponding
cuadX device to become inactive, and
then wait for the carrier detect line to go active. When
the cuadX device is opened, it makes
sure the serial port is not already in use by the
ttydX device. If the port is
available, it steals it from the
ttydX device. Also, the
cuadX device does not care about
carrier detect. With this scheme and an auto-answer
modem, remote users can log in and local users can still
dial out with the same modem and the system will take care
of all the conflicts.

15.5.

How do I enable support for a multi-port serial
card?

The section on kernel configuration provides
information about configuring the kernel. For a
multi-port serial card, place an sio(4) line for each
serial port on the card in the device.hints(5) file.
But place the IRQ specifiers on only one of the entries.
All of the ports on the card should share one IRQ. For
consistency, use the last serial port to specify the IRQ.
Also, specify the following option in the kernel
configuration file:

options COM_MULTIPORT

The following /boot/device.hints
example is for an AST 4-port serial card on
IRQÂ 12:

The built-in tip(1) and
cu(1) utilities can only access the
/var/spool/lock directory via user
uucp and group
dialer.
Use the dialer group to control
who has access to the modem or remote systems by adding
user accounts to dialer.

Alternatively, everyone can be configured to run
tip(1) and cu(1) by typing:

FreeBSD uses a lot of swap space even when the computer
has free memory left. Why?

FreeBSD will proactively move entirely idle, unused pages
of main memory into swap in order to make more main memory
available for active use. This heavy use of swap is
balanced by using the extra free memory for
caching.

Note that while FreeBSD is proactive in this regard, it
does not arbitrarily decide to swap pages when the system
is truly idle. Thus, the system will not be all
paged out after leaving it
idle overnight.

16.2.

Why does top show very little free
memory even when I have very few programs running?

The simple answer is that free memory is wasted
memory. Any memory that programs do not actively
allocate is used within the FreeBSD kernel as disk cache.
The values shown by top(1) labeled as
Inact, Cache, and
Buf are all cached data at different
aging levels. This cached data means the system does not
have to access a slow disk again for data it has accessed
recently, thus increasing overall performance. In
general, a low value shown for Free
memory in top(1) is good, provided it is not
very low.

16.3.

Why will chmod not change the
permissions on symlinks?

Symlinks do not have permissions, and by default,
chmod(1) will follow symlinks to change the
permissions on the source file, if possible. For
the file, foo with a symlink named
bar, this command
will always succeed.

%chmod g-w bar

However, the permissions on bar
will not have changed.

When changing modes of the file hierarchies rooted in
the files instead of the files themselves, use
either -H or -L together
with -R to make this work. See
chmod(1) and symlink(7) for more
information.

Warning:

-R does a
recursivechmod(1). Be
careful about specifying directories or symlinks to
directories to chmod(1). To change the
permissions of a directory referenced by a symlink, use
chmod(1) without any options and follow the symlink
with a trailing slash (/). For
example, if foo is a symlink to
directory bar, to
change the permissions of foo
(actually bar), do
something like:

%chmod 555 foo/

With the trailing slash, chmod(1) will follow
the symlink, foo, to change the
permissions of the directory,
bar.

16.4.

Can I run DOS binaries under FreeBSD?

Yes. A DOS emulation program,
emulators/doscmd, is available in the
FreeBSD Ports Collection.

If doscmd will not suffice,
emulators/pcemu
emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run many DOS
text-mode applications. It requires the X Window
System.

The Ports Collection also has
emulators/dosbox. The main focus of
this application is emulating old DOS games using the
local file system for files.

16.5.

What do I need to do to translate a FreeBSD document into
my native language?

The FreeBSD.org mail
system implements some
Postfix checks on incoming mail
and rejects mail that is either from misconfigured relays
or otherwise appears likely to be spam. Some of the
specific requirements are:

The IP address of the SMTP client must
"reverse-resolve" to a forward confirmed
hostname.

The fully-qualified hostname given in the
SMTP conversation (either HELO or EHLO) must resolve
to the IP address of the client.

Other advice to help mail reach its destination
include:

Mail should be sent in plain text, and messages
sent to mailing lists should generally be no more than
200KB in length.

Avoid excessive cross posting. Choose
one mailing list which seems most
relevant and send it there.

If you still have trouble with email infrastructure at
FreeBSD.org,
send a note with the details to
<postmaster@freebsd.org>; Include a
date/time interval so that logs may be reviewed —
and note that we only keep one week's worth of mail logs.
(Be sure to specify the time zone or offset from
UTC.)

16.7.

Where can I find a free FreeBSD account?

While FreeBSD does not provide open access to any of
their servers, others do provide open access UNIXÂ®
systems. The charge varies and limited services may be
available.

Arbornet,
Inc, also known as M-Net,
has been providing open access to UNIXÂ® systems since
1983. Starting on an Altos running System III, the site
switched to BSD/OS in 1991. In June of 2000, the site
switched again to FreeBSD. M-Net can be
accessed via telnet and
SSH and provides basic access
to the entire FreeBSD software suite. However, network
access is limited to members and patrons who donate to the
system, which is run as a non-profit organization.
M-Net also provides an bulletin board
system and interactive chat.

16.8.

What is the cute little red guy's name?

He does not have one, and is just called “the
BSD daemon”. If you insist upon using a name,
call him “beastie”. Note that
“beastie” is pronounced
“BSD”.

In summary, the image can be used in a tasteful
manner, for personal use, so long as appropriate credit
is given. Before using the logo commercially, contact
Kirk McKusick <mckusick@FreeBSD.org> for permission. More details are
available on the BSD
Daemon's home page.

16.10.

Do you have any BSD daemon images I could use?

Xfig and eps drawings are available under
/usr/share/examples/BSD_daemon/.

16.11.

I have seen an acronym or other term on the mailing
lists and I do not understand what it means. Where should
I look?

The really, really short answer is that you should
not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you
are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you
should stop others from building one just because you do
not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a
metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every
little feature just because you know enough to do so.
Some people have commented that the amount of noise
generated by a change is inversely proportional to the
complexity of the change.

It is a long story, or rather it is an old story,
but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson
wrote a book in the early 1960s, called
“Parkinson's Law”, which contains a lot of
insight into the dynamics of management.

[snip a bit of commentary on the
book]

In the specific example involving the bike shed, the
other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess
that illustrates the age of the book.

Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of
directors and get approval for building a multi-million
or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you
want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in
endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic
plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that
people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall
back on the assumption that somebody else checked all
the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann
gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the
point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his
books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one
of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch
the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no
matter how reasonable you are with your proposal,
somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing
his job, that he is paying attention, that he is
here.

In Denmark we call it “setting your
fingerprint”. It is about personal pride and
prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and
say “There! I did
that.” It is a strong trait in politicians, but
present in most people given the chance. Just think
about footsteps in wet cement.

Q. Has anyone done any temperature testing while
running FreeBSD? I know LinuxÂ® runs cooler than DOS, but
have never seen a mention of FreeBSD. It seems to run really
hot.

A. No, but we have done numerous taste tests on
blindfolded volunteers who have also had 250 micrograms of
LSD-25 administered beforehand. 35% of the volunteers
said that FreeBSD tasted sort of orange, whereas LinuxÂ®
tasted like purple haze. Neither group mentioned any
significant variances in temperature. We eventually had
to throw the results of this survey out entirely anyway
when we found that too many volunteers were wandering out
of the room during the tests, thus skewing the results.
We think most of the volunteers are at Apple now, working
on their new “scratch and sniff” GUI. It is
a funny old business we are in!

Seriously, FreeBSD uses the HLT (halt)
instruction when the system is idle thus lowering its
energy consumption and therefore the heat it generates.
Also if you have ACPI (Advanced
Configuration and Power Interface) configured, then FreeBSD
can also put the CPU into a low power mode.

17.2.

Who is scratching in my memory banks??

Q. Is there anything “odd” that FreeBSD
does when compiling the kernel which would cause the
memory to make a scratchy sound? When compiling (and for
a brief moment after recognizing the floppy drive upon
startup, as well), a strange scratchy sound emanates from
what appears to be the memory banks.

A. Yes! You will see frequent references to
“daemons” in the BSD documentation, and what
most people do not know is that this refers to genuine,
non-corporeal entities that now possess your computer.
The scratchy sound coming from your memory is actually
high-pitched whispering exchanged among the daemons as
they best decide how to deal with various system
administration tasks.

If the noise gets to you, a good fdisk
/mbr from DOS will get rid of them, but do not
be surprised if they react adversely and try to stop you.
In fact, if at any point during the exercise you hear the
satanic voice of Bill Gates coming from the built-in
speaker, take off running and do not ever look back!
Freed from the counterbalancing influence of the BSD
daemons, the twin demons of DOS and WindowsÂ® are often
able to re-assert total control over your machine to the
eternal damnation of your soul. Now that you know, given
a choice you would probably prefer to get used to the
scratchy noises, no?

17.3.

How many FreeBSD hackers does it take to change a
lightbulb?

One thousand, one hundred and sixty-nine:

Twenty-three to complain to -CURRENT about the lights
being out;

Four to claim that it is a configuration problem, and
that such matters really belong on -questions;

Three to submit PRs about it, one of which is misfiled
under doc and consists only of “it's
dark”;

One to commit an untested lightbulb which breaks
buildworld, then back it out five minutes later;

Eight to flame the PR originators for not including
patches in their PRs;

Five to complain about buildworld being broken;

Thirty-one to answer that it works for them, and they
must have updated at a bad time;

One to post a patch for a new lightbulb to
-hackers;

One to complain that he had patches for this three
years ago, but when he sent them to -CURRENT they were
just ignored, and he has had bad experiences with the PR
system; besides, the proposed new lightbulb is
non-reflexive;

Thirty-seven to scream that lightbulbs do not belong
in the base system, that committers have no right to do
things like this without consulting the Community, and
WHAT IS -CORE DOING ABOUT IT!?

Five hundred and eighty-six to engage in a flame war
about the comparative advantages of the GPL, the BSD
license, the MIT license, the NPL, and the personal
hygiene of unnamed FSF founders;

Seven to move various portions of the thread to -chat
and -advocacy;

One to commit the suggested lightbulb, even though it
shines dimmer than the old one;

Two to back it out with a furious flame of a commit
message, arguing that FreeBSD is better off in the dark than
with a dim lightbulb;

Forty-six to argue vociferously about the backing out
of the dim lightbulb and demanding a statement from
-core;

Eleven to request a smaller lightbulb so it will fit
their Tamagotchi if we ever decide to port FreeBSD to that
platform;

Seventy-three to complain about the SNR on -hackers
and -chat and unsubscribe in protest;

Thirteen to post “unsubscribe”,
“How do I unsubscribe?”, or “Please
remove me from the list”, followed by the usual
footer;

One to commit a working lightbulb while everybody is
too busy flaming everybody else to notice;

Thirty-one to point out that the new lightbulb would
shine 0.364% brighter if compiled with TenDRA (although it
will have to be reshaped into a cube), and that FreeBSD
should therefore switch to TenDRA instead of GCC;

One to complain that the new lightbulb lacks
fairings;

Nine (including the PR originators) to ask “what
is MFC?”;

Fifty-seven to complain about the lights being out two
weeks after the bulb has been changed.

It goes into a special data sink in the CPU where it
is converted to heat which is vented through the heatsink
/ fan assembly. This is why CPU cooling is increasingly
important; as people get used to faster processors, they
become careless with their data and more and more of it
ends up in /dev/null, overheating
their CPUs. If you delete /dev/null
(which effectively disables the CPU data sink) your CPU
may run cooler but your system will quickly become
constipated with all that excess data and start to behave
erratically. If you have a fast network connection you
can cool down your CPU by reading data out of
/dev/random and sending it off
somewhere; however you run the risk of overheating your
network connection and / or angering
your ISP, as most of the data will end up getting
converted to heat by their equipment, but they generally
have good cooling, so if you do not overdo it you should
be OK.

Paul Robinson adds:

There are other methods. As every good sysadmin
knows, it is part of standard practice to send data to the
screen of interesting variety to keep all the pixies that
make up your picture happy. Screen pixies (commonly
mis-typed or re-named as “pixels”) are
categorized by the type of hat they wear (red, green or
blue) and will hide or appear (thereby showing the color
of their hat) whenever they receive a little piece of
food. Video cards turn data into pixie-food, and then
send them to the pixies — the more expensive the
card, the better the food, so the better behaved the
pixies are. They also need constant stimulation —
this is why screen savers exist.

To take your suggestions further, you could just throw
the random data to console, thereby letting the pixies
consume it. This causes no heat to be produced at all,
keeps the pixies happy and gets rid of your data quite
quickly, even if it does make things look a bit messy on
your screen.

Incidentally, as an ex-admin of a large ISP who
experienced many problems attempting to maintain a stable
temperature in a server room, I would strongly discourage
people sending the data they do not want out to the
network. The fairies who do the packet switching and
routing get annoyed by it as well.

There are currently 4 active/semi-active
branches in the FreeBSD Subversion
Repository. (Earlier branches are only changed
very rarely, which is why there are only 4
active branches of development):

stable/8/ AKA
8-STABLE

stable/9/ AKA
9-STABLE

stable/10/ AKA
10-STABLE

head/ AKA
-CURRENT AKA
11-CURRENT

HEAD is not an actual branch tag.
It is a symbolic constant for
the current, non-branched development
stream known as
-CURRENT.

Right now, -CURRENT is the
11.X development stream; the 10-STABLE
branch, stable/10/, forked off from
-CURRENT in January 2014 and the
9-STABLE branch, stable/9/, forked off from
-CURRENT in September 2011.

18.4.

Can I follow -CURRENT with
limited Internet access?

Yes, this can be done without
downloading the whole source tree by using the CTM
facility.

This message is not enough. While the instruction
pointer value is important, it is also configuration
dependent as it varies depending on the kernel image.
If it is a GENERIC kernel
image from one of the snapshots, it is possible for
somebody else to track down the offending function, but
for a custom kernel, only you can tell us where the fault
occurred.

To proceed:

Write down the instruction pointer value. Note
that the 0x8: part at the beginning
is not significant in this case: it is the
0xf0xxxxxx part that we
want.

When the system reboots, do the following:

%nm -n kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxxx

where f0xxxxxx is the
instruction pointer value. The odds are you will not
get an exact match since the symbols in the kernel
symbol table are for the entry points of functions and
the instruction pointer address will be somewhere
inside a function, not at the start. If you do not
get an exact match, omit the last digit from the
instruction pointer value and try again:

%nm -n kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxx

If that does not yield any results, chop off
another digit. Repeat until there is some sort of
output. The result will be a possible list of
functions which caused the panic. This is a less than
exact mechanism for tracking down the point of
failure, but it is better than nothing.

However, the best way to track down the cause of a
panic is by capturing a crash dump, then using
kgdb(1) to generate a stack trace on the crash
dump.

In any case, the method is this:

Make sure that the following line is included in
the kernel configuration file:

Note:

If KERNCONF is not included,
the GENERIC kernel will instead
be built and installed.

The make(1) process will have built two kernels.
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYKERNEL/kernel
and
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYKERNEL/kernel.debug.
kernel was installed as
/boot/kernel/kernel, while
kernel.debug can be used as the
source of debugging symbols for kgdb(1).

To capture a crash dump, edit
/etc/rc.conf and set
dumpdev to point to either the swap
partition or AUTO. This will cause the
rc(8) scripts to use the dumpon(8) command to
enable crash dumps. This command can also be run
manually. After a panic, the crash dump can be recovered
using savecore(8); if dumpdev is
set in /etc/rc.conf, the rc(8)
scripts will run savecore(8) automatically and put
the crash dump in /var/crash.

Note:

FreeBSD crash dumps are usually the same size as
physical RAM. Therefore, make sure there is enough
space in /var/crash to hold the
dump. Alternatively, run savecore(8) manually
and have it recover the crash dump to another directory
with more room. It is possible to limit the
size of the crash dump by using options
MAXMEM=N where
N is the size of kernel's
memory usage in KBs. For example, for 1Â GB
of RAM, limit the kernel's memory usage to
128Â MB, so that the crash dump size
will be 128Â MB instead of 1Â GB.

Once the crash dump has been recovered , get a
stack trace as follows:

Note that there may be several screens worth of
information. Ideally, use script(1) to
capture all of them. Using the unstripped kernel image
with all the debug symbols should show the exact line of
kernel source code where the panic occurred. The stack
trace is usually read from the bottom up to trace
the exact sequence of events that lead to the crash.
kgdb(1) can also be used to print out the contents of
various variables or structures to examine the system
state at the time of the crash.

Tip:

If a second computer is available, kgdb(1) can
be configured to do remote debugging, including setting
breakpoints and single-stepping through the kernel
code.

Note:

If DDB is enabled and the
kernel drops into the debugger, a panic
and a crash dump can be forced by typing
panic at the ddb
prompt. It may stop in the debugger again during the
panic phase. If it does, type
continue and it will finish the crash
dump.

18.7.

Why has dlsym() stopped working
for ELF executables?

The ELF toolchain does not, by default, make the
symbols defined in an executable visible to the dynamic
linker. Consequently dlsym()
searches on handles obtained from calls to
dlopen(NULL, flags) will fail to find
such symbols.

To search, using
dlsym(), for symbols present in the
main executable of a process, link the
executable using the --export-dynamic
option to the ELF linker (ld(1)).

18.8.

How can I increase or reduce the kernel address space
on i386?

By default, the kernel address space is 1Â GB
(2Â GB for PAE) for i386. When running a
network-intensive server or using
ZFS, this will probably not be
enough.

Add the following line to the kernel configuration
file to increase available space and rebuild the
kernel:

options KVA_PAGES=N

To find the correct value of
N, divide the desired address
space size (in megabytes) by four. (For example, it is
512 for 2Â GB.)

ChapterÂ 19.Â Acknowledgments

This innocent little Frequently Asked Questions document has
been written, rewritten, edited, folded, spindled, mutilated,
eviscerated, contemplated, discombobulated, cogitated,
regurgitated, rebuilt, castigated, and reinvigorated over the
last decade, by a cast of hundreds if not thousands.
Repeatedly.

We wish to thank every one of the people responsible, and we
encourage you to join
them in making this FAQ even
better.